Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bellcore!wind!sdh
From: sdh@wind.bellcore.com (Stephen D Hawley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Random comments
Message-ID: <17337@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Date: 3 Aug 89 13:52:27 GMT
References: <10425@dasys1.UUCP>
Sender: news@bellcore.bellcore.com
Reply-To: sdh@wind.UUCP (Stephen D Hawley)
Organization: Bellcore, Morristown, NJ
Lines: 26

In article <10425@dasys1.UUCP> aj-mberg@dasys1.UUCP (Micha Berger) writes:
> I also mind that DO loops up to,
>not including the limit - it's not intuitive.

Depends on what your definition of intuitive is.  :')

Consider the pascal loop:
	for x := 1 to 20 do ... ;

This runs x from 1 to 20 inclusive, just what you expect.
But what about the c loop:
	for (x=0; x < 20; x++) ... ;

This also iterates 20 times, but goes from 0 to 19.
I find this more intuitive.  Really.  I've made more boundary errors with
pascal than with any other language (iterate once too many or once too few).
I think this is because of the tendency to start at 1 in pascal.  Most of the
programs I've seen in pascal do this (as well as declaring arrays as [1..n]).

Fine.  So what does this have to do with forth?  Well, not much really,
except that 'intuitive' is subjective, not universal.

Steve Hawley
sdh@flash.bellcore.com
"Up is where you hang your hat."
	--Jim Blandy, computer scientist