dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug Philips) (02/20/91)
In article <9102211449.AA20733@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, S47852EF@ETSUACAD.BITNET ("Frank C. Earl") writes: > Despite this, if the dpANS is turned into ANS Forth, I'll use it... > (I may not like it, but I'll use it...) > If anything, to just avoid re-inventing the wheel as much as I possibly can > :) Agreed. As a minimalist purist (or partly one anyway), I would really like to see a tight coherent and powerful CORE wordset and couldn't care less about the extensions. As a pragmatic programmer and designer, I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. Performance, esp. on a workstation, is not as much a concern as are maintainability and portability. If I really need the speed I can rewrite the file I/O words. I would much rather plug in that part and concentrate on the application specific parts of my application. Yes, I realize that the standard file I/O words may not suffice in all cases, but 90% is better than nothing. -Doug --- Preferred: dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us Ok: {pitt,sei,uunet}!willett!dwp
S47852EF@ETSUACAD.BITNET ("Frank C. Earl") (02/21/91)
Mitch, I *LIKE* that statement that you made about the "reinventing of the wheel" BEING ONE OF THE PROBLEMS WITH FORTH'S POPULARITY... I, TOO, HAVE SEEN AL too many hoky implementations purporting to be 79-standard/83-standard and really only barely meeting the rquirements of those standards (or, even resembling a Forth at all!!) I may not like what is rumored to be in the BASIS - I'm bothered a little by the rationale for the use of WORDSET in lieu of VOCABULARY; what I heard of of the reasons given for the change there simply didn't seem to be enough for my liking... Not to mention the forms of signed division (We now need the code for both forms in the dictionary instead of one- or so I understand it to be); they both give incorrect answers in the third quadrant (both numbers negative...) the MOD part of /MOD for either algorithm is NEGATIVE when it should be positive (which is mathematically wrong...). [ Don't get this wrong... I'm not flogging dead horses here; I'm just mentioning some of my misgivings with what I know by way of what has been said on the net (My attempt at getting the BASIS 14 document vanished into the Infamous-Big-Bit-Bucket (IBBB) on the net and I simply don't have a concrete idea of exactly WHAT the BASIS really is right now...). ] Despite this, if the dpANS is turned into ANS Forth, I'll use it... (I may not like it, but I'll use it...) If anything, to just avoid re-inventing the wheel as much as I possibly can :) Thanks, Frank C. Earl Bitnet : s47852ef@etsuacad Internet : s47852ef@etsuacad.etsu.edu ( For quicker reply, send all flames to /dev/null... ;)
wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (02/21/91)
> I'm bothered a little by the rationale for the use of WORDSET in lieu > of VOCABULARY; what I heard of of the reasons given for the change there > simply didn't seem to be enough for my liking... If the word VOCABULARY exists in the standard, then the upgrade path for several important commercial implementations is made considerably more difficult. In particular, polyForth, LMI Forth, MacForth, and MVP Forth all have the word VOCABULARY in different forms. Any definition of VOCABULARY that you choose will break at least 3 of those 4 systems. This seems like a strong argument to me. Those systems represent many thousands of Forth programmers between them. > Not to mention the forms of signed division (We now need the code for > both forms in the dictionary instead of one- or so I understand it to > be); Remember, the code *doesn't have to be in the dictionary*. It just has to be available. It could even be a paper listing that the user could type in, defining, for instance, FM/MOD in terms of SM/MOD or UM/MOD . > they both give incorrect answers in the third quadrant (both numbers > negative...) the MOD part of /MOD for either algorithm is NEGATIVE when > it should be positive (which is mathematically wrong...). Is it? Knuth Vol. 1, Page 38, says: if y < 0 , then 0 >= x mod y > y Also see Robert Berkey's excellent discussion of division in the proceedings of the 1982 FORML conference. Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM