Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!dunn
From: dunn@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (John Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: ANS TC Magnet for Interpreter
Message-ID: <6216@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 90 23:04:28 GMT
References: <9001172005.AA21025@jade.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: dunn@uhccux.UUCP (John Dunn)
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 27

In article <9001172005.AA21025@jade.berkeley.edu> Forth Interest Group International List <FIGI-L%SCFVM.bitnet@jade.berkeley.edu> writes:
>> ... discussion about various ways to specify explicit number base ...
>> MB: H# D#
>> RB: %, etc
>> FS: $, h', etc
>
>The trouble with this topic is that everybody in the whole world has
>a different idea about what "looks" good.  Everybody is "used" to something
>from exposure to some random assembly language.
>
I'm not sure what the fuss is about here.  For years, over several
different Forths, I have simply trapped the string before it gets
to NUMBER, and look for an appended character that designates 
a specified base.  My preference happens to be "H" for hex, and
the default is decimal, but so what - the character can be any
non-numeric you pick.  The trap routine looks at the string,
and if the character is detected as the last character of the
string (could be the first character, but my preference is 
to use the last), the current base is pushed to the stack, 
BASE is changed, the character is stripped from the string,
and NUMBER is called.  Then the BASE is restored.  Simple,
and works just fine.  Forths that vector NUMBER make this
especially easy, but I have never had much trouble finding
a way to redefine low level words regardless of the implementation.
One of the nicer features of Forth.

-John Dunn