Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Flammable question Message-ID: Date: 22 Mar 90 12:38:30 GMT References: <3017@uwm.edu> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 20 > FORTH gives you the efficiency. Forth gives you space efficiency. It doesn't give you much in the way of time efficiency. In general, unless you spend a lot of time on micro-optimisation, Forth is a pretty slow beast. Even a good compiled Forth will lose out to a good compiled HLL, simply because you give up too many opportunities for compiler optimisations when you work in such a low level language. Forth is for systems you can't fit a HLL and its bloated runtime into. > Clarity is mainly depended on > the programmer. I don't find C has any more clarity than FORTH. I do. I've worked with some pretty large Forth programs, and unless you're an incredible programmer it's just unmanageable beyond a (fairly low) threshold. Forth is for small systems or brilliant programmers. It's a small systems language. It's bloody great at that. Let's not get carried away by the Forth religion. -- _--_|\ `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . / \ 'U` \_.--._/ v