LANGOWSKI@FREMBL51.BITNET (Joerg Langowski) (09/06/88)
Here's one more comment to Fraser's Forth Flames, to add to the endless list: - Why are you insisting so much that there HAS to be a preprocessor in Forth? This is not the point; if anybody needs it, he/she can write one for the purpose intended, and this has been done many times. That's one of the main advantages of Forth, but this has been said over and over again. I don't even think anybody here would deny that such a preprocessor would be something nice to have. Only, the overwhelming majority of participants in this group seems to be quite satisfied with their respective systems. If there was a bad need in the Forth community to have such additional constructs, you can bet your ### they would have been added and used. Now, I see the main controversy here as being not between Forth, C, Pascal, etc., etc., (btw: how does LISP fit into your scheme?), but between an advocate of an administrative programming style, which certainly is advantageous or even required for large multi-programmer projects, and users/programmers of smaller systems, who want to have as much individual freedom for their particular purpose as possible. Am I mistaken? Joerg Langowski <langowski@frembl51.bitnet> EMBL, c/o ILL 156X F-38042 Grenoble Cedex France