Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!purdue!bouma
From: bouma@cs.purdue.EDU (William J. Bouma)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: forth standard
Summary: why so primitive?
Keywords: gripes, observations
Message-ID: <7224@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 21 Jul 89 19:14:16 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 42


    I really love the structure of forth. It is elegant in its
    simplicity as anyone who has used, (or especially written), it
    knows. But I feel that the standard is lacking in many ways
    and wonder if any of you agree with me?

    People have questioned here why forth has failed to catch on as
    a general purpose language. I think it is beacuse the standard
    is at such a low level. People are used to using files these days.
    Why does the standard still deal with primitive junk like BLOCKS
    and BUFFERS? Sure, given the primitives, someone who knows forth
    quite well can hack together a usable abstract file system. But
    people want that stuff to be available when they start using the
    language. I also think they would like to have their i/o be 
    compatible with that in someone else's system rather than everyone
    having different words to do the same function.

    People want a language that is flexible and self documenting. For
    the most part, forth is that way. But there are stupid and needless
    exceptions. For example, DO seems quite inflexible in requiring you
    to use I and J as the loop variables. And if you want to nest 3 deep
    you have to define a new word which indexes directly into a system
    stack. Why not just say DO I ... where I could be any variable name?
    
    People want to have a rich set of data types available without
    having to load seperate packages that are incompatible with every
    else'. Suggestions have been made in this group to have a seperate
    floating point stack. Why bother? Just have one stack with data
    types tagged. Sure it will be a bit slower, but think about what
    is gained. Besides, forth doesn't burn unless its on a special 
    chip anyway. Words could also be provided that don't do type
    checking for an increase in speed.

    Well, I was just dissapointed to look at the forth 83 standard and
    see that basically nothing had improved from the forth 79 that I
    knew. Only a few of the words have changed. Forth as it still stands
    seems mainly good for interfacing to hardware or for cramming much
    functionality into a limited memory space. Most of the people who
    talk about using forth seem to be dealing with computers at the
    hardware level. 
-- 
Bill <bouma@cs.purdue.edu>  ||  ...!purdue!bouma