wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (10/17/90)
A hypertext filing system would be nice, but it's not likely to be portable without a lot of preliminary work. Specifically, what is needed first is a portable display management package which will work across a wide variety of machines, with different window systems and even with "dumb terminals". The closest models I know of are the Unix "curses" package and EMACS. It doesn't appear likely that the computer world is going to settle on a single window system/graphic display standard any time soon. Even if it did, it would be a very long time before all the machines that are running Forth would be using that standard. Industries as a whole move rather slowly, and the Forth community is even worse. Individual Forth programmers can move very quickly, implementing new ideas and concepts in Forth. The Forth community as a whole seems to move at a snail's pace, because of a combination of the "old ways are better" attitude and the fundamental contrariness of Forth programmers (if we weren't contrary, we would be using C like everybody else). If ANS Forth is approved, Forth will have standard file access sometime in the 1990's, 15 years after every other language had it. To expect the Forth community to agree on any particular hypertext interface within the forseeable future is optimistic at best. Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM