wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (08/25/90)
> 1. Can the return stack be extended to make recursion viable? > 2. Is there a Standard mechanism for deferred execution? > 3. Can the user control compilation enough to define a simple > control-flow structure? > I would like to thank for Mitch Bradley for replying. As he has shown, > the answer is a discouraging NO on all points. I object to this analysis. The answer to (1) is indeed no, but I disagree entirely with 2 and 3. Dr. Wavrik's objection to my suggested implemtation of DEFER was purely on efficiency ground; the high level definition takes longer than a machine code definition. Well, campers, even if ANS Forth standardizes DEFER , that imposes no requirement upon implementors to implement it in machine code. This issue has nothing at all to do with portability, and very little to do with efficiency. I would be surprised if small (factor of 2) differences in the efficiency of DEFER compared to NOOP made any perceptible difference in the execution time of real applications. Dr. Wavrik's objection to my (string-based) ANS implementation of his simple control structure was based upon a misunderstanding of the implementation. The claim that my implementation stores strings in the dictionary for later evaluation is false. Mitch