tyche@milton.acs.washington.edu (Berg/Onstad) (01/24/90)
Several people have discussed Marketing Forth and/or selling Forth to Management. One thing I find missing in the discussion is the mention of Source Code Control. I find this element critical to projects that involve more than a couple people. Are people using something like Polytron's PCS or MPW Projector to store source diffs? How well does the blocks scheme work with these source management systems? Forth words are decomposed more than the average procedures in other languages. Does this place special demands on a source management system? Enquiring Minds want to know ... Kevin Berg than the average languages
wmb@SUN.COM (01/24/90)
> Are people using something like Polytron's PCS or MPW Projector > to store source diffs? How well does the blocks scheme work > with these source management systems? We use the Unix SCCS (RCS would work just as well) facility and store Forth source code in regular text files. I know of another company that manages their Forth source code with some data base program running on networked PC's. They too use text files. I would expect that SCCS would have some trouble with blocks, because its basic unit of difference comparison is a line. Anyway, the use of screens for source under an operating system that prefers to use files is an anachronism. Screens are an optimization for a set of constraints that no longer applies in most cases. More than any other aspect of Forth, the use of screens for source code has made Forth look ridiculous in the eyes of the rest of the programming community. > Forth words are decomposed > more than the average procedures in other languages. Does this > place special demands on a source management system? It doesn't seem to. SCCS doesn't care about procedure boundaries; it calculates differences on a line-by-line basis. Mitch