Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!gatech!udel!nelson
From: nelson@udel.EDU (Mark Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: ANSI X3J14 TC Member Solicits Recommendations
Keywords: ANSI, X3J14, 1's-complement, math, logic, primitives
Message-ID: <18836@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 30 Jun 89 20:01:39 GMT
References: <12488@well.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@udel.EDU
Reply-To: nelson@udel.EDU (Mark Nelson)
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 23

In article <12488@well.UUCP> jax@well.UUCP (Jack J. Woehr) writes:
>	Forth implicitly recognizes 2's-complement arithmetic.
>
>	Not all computation is done in 2's-complement. The CRAY,
>for instance, is a 1's-complement machine.
>
Minor nit: All Cray Research Inc. computers are 2's-complement
machines.  The CDC 6000, 7000, Cyber 170, etc. machines designed
by Seymour Cray were 1's-complement.

Since I'm already using up net bandwidth, my vote is to require
apparent 2's-complement arithmetic for the Forth standard.  If
you really have to run Forth on a 1's complement machine, write
software 2's-complement arithmetic.  Why?  Because I can't think
of any 1's-complement architectures designed in the past 20 years,
and hiding the negative integer representation in Forth would be
hard, and would likely slow code down.



Mark Nelson                 ...!rutgers!udel!nelson or nelson@udel.edu
This function is occasionally useful as an argument to other functions
that require functions as arguments. -- Guy Steele