wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (02/21/91)
> Interesting. I've had relatively little trouble porting applications from > processor to processor. It's moving from "standard" to "standard" that gives > me headaches. The differences between standards don't cause me too much trouble; the problems that bother me the most are coping with things that I have to deal with but which neither FIG-Forth, Forth-79, nor Forth-83 bothered to address at all. Specifically files, floating point, 32-bit machines, memory allocation, strings, and error handling. In the areas where previous standards differ, there is a small finite number of possibilities, and it is fairly easy to make a few redefinitions to cope with the 2 or 3 possibilities. The exception is vocabularies, where the previous standards differed so widely that the only portable thing to do is to not use them! In the areas that previous standards totally ignored, the range of variation across implementations is much greater, from "no solution at all" to "a set of words that works on this particular vendor's system but no other". That is why I am enthusiastic about ANS Forth, whose extension wordsets addresss the issues that concern me most. Even if the ANS Forth extension wordsets are not 100% perfect, they are very very useful. In my opinion, with the exception of strings, the extension wordsets are all good enough that it's probably counterproductive to tweak them any further. Mitch Bradley