wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (02/11/91)
> Second, didn't Dijkstra complain that other languages were standardized > way too soon? Rudolf Flesch in *The Art of Plain Talk* says about the > Chinese language: "It is the most grown-up talk in the world. It is > the way people speak who started to simplify their language thousands of > years ago and have kept at it ever since." My former boss is Chinese. So is his wife. They communicate in English because he speaks Cantonese and she speaks Mandarin. They can't understand each other in Chinese. Another Chinese friend of mine can't understand either of them; she speaks Taiwanese. The current state of the Forth language is very much the same. > He also says (I summarize) that English will never catch up because > we became literate and froze the language too soon. English is understood in more countries than any other language. It is the international language for air traffic control, and the language of most international business. Esthetically, English is a mess. But it's very useful. > I think it is far too soon to "standardize" Forth. When I offer my > opinions about ( y x -) versus ( x y -) or decimal points, etc they are > merely my current thinking. I am not through thinking. I don't want > any of this frozen into a "standard" yet. Please let us know when you are through thinking, so we can then get around to standardizing the stuff. Personally, I think that the "new" stuff in ANS Forth is *entirely boring*. I am very tired of having to think about that old stuff (in other words, having to wonder which of the "n" nearly-equivalent ways that implementation "x" chose for expressing feature "y"). There are a whole lot of decisions where it doesn't matter which way you choose, so long as you pick one and get on with it (assuming that you don't pick an obviously stupid choice). Mitch