wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (02/04/91)
I just got back from the ANS Forth meeting in Los Angeles. Most of the action occurred in the extension wordsets. The technical issues have been pretty much put to rest. Some highlights: New control flow words: AHEAD (unconditional forward branch), SO (ROLL for control flow tokens), STILL (PICK for control flow tokens). These words complete the set of control flow primitives, allowing the creation of user-defined control structures to implement *any* control flow graph. Clarification of input stream mechanism: The new variable BLOCK-FID contains the fileid of the file containing the blocks accessible via BLOCK, BUFFER, and LOAD. If BLOCK-FID is zero, the blocks come from the system default block space (which may or may not be a file). This does not affect interpretation from text files; that still depends on the SOURCE-FILE value (-1 for string input, 0 for keyboard input, otherwise it's the fileid of the input text file). Conditional compilation: A wordset for conditional compilation is going out for letter ballot. It looks like it may pass. The proposal calls for fully-nestable, immediate words IFTRUE OTHERWISE IFEND (same names as in Forth 83). Multitasking: All mention of multitasking has been moved to an appendix that describes the "traditions" of Forth multitasking. Decompiler: New word SEE (decompiler) added to the toolkit extension wordset. The decompilation format is system-dependent. EMIT?: EMIT? (check for output device ready) added to toolkit extension wordset. Search order: ADDITIONS changed back to DEFINITIONS , FORTH-WORDLIST added to search order wordset, ISOLATE removed. The search order wordset now contains a precisely-defined "primitive" set of search order words, suitable for use as tools to implement any search order scheme. The search order extension wordset now contains ONLY ALSO etc. AT-XY: Popular sentiment suggests that the name >COLROW sucks, so the name was changed to "AT-XY" (just AT was suggested, but that name has inconsistent common usage). GET-DATE: (or maybe it's GET-TIME ??) Returns the "wall clock" time as ( -- sec min hrs day mon year ) sec:0-59 min:0-59 hrs:0-23 day:1-31 mon:1-12 year:e.g.1991 (in CORE EXT wordset). That's all I remember right now. Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM
jax@well.sf.ca.us (Jack J. Woehr) (02/07/91)
wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM writes: >I just got back from the ANS Forth meeting in Los Angeles. Most of >the action occurred in the extension wordsets. The technical issues >have been pretty much put to rest. >Some highlights: ... stuff ... >That's all I remember right now. >Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM Mitch ... you forgot to mention we are letter-balloting the entire Technical COmmittee on whether the forth-coming BASIS15 should become ... ... dpANS!!!!! We're on our way to ANS Forth, gang! -- <jax@well.{UUCP,sf.ca.us} >< Member, > /// ///\\\ \\\ /// <well!jax@lll-winken.arpa >< X3J14 TC > /// /// \\\ \\\/// <JAX on GEnie >< for ANS > \\\ /// ///====\\\ ///\\\ <SYSOP RCFB (303) 278-0364>< Forth > \\\/// /// \\\ /// \\\