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From: andrew@idacom.UUCP (Andrew Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Success of FORTH in the marketplace
Message-ID: <711@idacom.UUCP>
Date: 6 Aug 89 23:38:42 GMT
References: <8907300608.AA04417@jade.berkeley.edu>
Organization: IDACOM Electronics Ltd., Edmonton, Alta.
Lines: 21

In article <8907300608.AA04417@jade.berkeley.edu>, ZMLEB@SCFVM.BITNET (Lee Brotzman) writes:
>    I don't think that Forth is easy to learn.  But, I think that time spent
> learning Forth is time well spent.  The hard-won Forth mentalilty serves any
> programmer well in any language.

Agreed.  I think Brodie's "Thinking Forth" is the best book about programming
that I've ever read.  The techniques learned apply to so much more than just
the Forth language.

>    This may be a harsh statement, but I still think that the only way that
> Forth can be truly appreciated is to write a Forth interpreter on you own.

I agree on this count also.  I recently wrote an optimized subroutine threaded
Forth.  Figuring out how to implement things like DOES> and [COMPILE] makes you
appreciate how useful they can be. There's a bit of discovery involved - you
don't consider words like those when solving problems if you've never seen
anything like them before.  Looking at each word in detail when porting or
creating a new Forth results in a lot of fresh insight.
-- 
Andrew Scott			andrew@idacom
			- or -	{att, watmath, ubc-cs}!alberta!idacom!andrew