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From: scowl@.cs.pdx.edu (Scott W. Larson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: New Directions: Forth is not postfix
Message-ID: <2243@psueea.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 90 20:19:43 GMT
References: <284.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
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Reply-To: scowl@eecs.UUCP (Scott W. Larson)
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In article <284.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP> dwp@willett.UUCP (Doug Philips) writes:
>Let me say right off that I am *not* proposing any of this for ANSI Forth.
>
>One of the things that is an annoying inconsistency is that
>Forth is not fully postfix.  The words ':', 'IF', 'DO', 'ELSE'
>etc. are prefix.  Has anyone out there done real postfix forth?

The prefix words like ':', '."' and 'abort' are very irritating
when writing a new outer interpreter because there is no way
to pass string values to them at run time. What if I want to
write a new ':' that does what ':' does, but gets the name of
the new definition from somewhere other than input. It would
be much more flexible to have colon work like this:

  " MyDef" :

In my case, I have to totally redefine ':' from scratch.

Fortunately the Forth-83 standard made 'find' work this way,
otherwise my senior project would be dead in the water.