Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!bouma
From: bouma@cs.purdue.EDU (William J. Bouma)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: alternate number syntax
Message-ID: <9308@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 90 18:03:07 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 22

>See?  Everybody has his own pet scheme.  I could live with just about
>any reasonable scheme, but so far there have been as many proposed
>schemes as there are people, and there don't seem to be any compelling
>arguments to choose between them.  "looks ugly" is pretty subjective.
>
>Heavy sigh,
>Mitch

    As usual, I like the way LISP deals with this. 
    LISP has a general "dispatching character" which is #.
    # is followed by a number (optionally) and a single character which
    is used to determine which function to run. 'r' is used for radix
    dispatching, so a binary number could be specified #2r10110. Imagine
    FORTH had such facility. One could define an octal dispatching
    function something like this:

    : #o base @ 8 base ! word number swap base ! ;

    Such a facility can be useful for much more than just number conversion.

-- 
Bill <bouma@cs.purdue.edu>  ||  ...!purdue!bouma