Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!rutgers!cunixf.cc.columbia.edu!jbaltz From: jbaltz@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Jerry B. Altzman) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Flammable question Message-ID: <1990Mar22.160027.7957@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Date: 22 Mar 90 16:00:27 GMT References: <3017@uwm.edu> Reply-To: jbaltz@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Jerry B. Altzman) Organization: mailer daemons association Lines: 45 In article peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: >> 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. Well, if you think about the problem well in the first place, you can do a lot of the optimization yourself, if you watch what's going on, and aren't lazy about it. C let's you be lazy about it. >Forth is for systems you can't fit a HLL and its bloated runtime into. Forth is for anything, really. I've programmed it on machines on which there were nice HLL's, and Forth was the language of choice, not because we were controlling real-time devices, but for other reasons (which I don't really want to get into now.) >> 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. I don't. I've worked with some pretty large Forth programs (5k+ "blocks" of code) and the code was pretty well obvious, because the previous programmers took the time to a) prettyprint the code (you'd be surprised how much that helps) b) break the code up into logical modules c) commented (albeit not well: e.g. "Don't muck with this or the machine will crash") >Forth is for small systems or brilliant programmers. I won't comment on this one, Peter :-) > _--_|\ `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . DISCLAIMER: This isn't Columbia. This is me. Columbia is them. //jbaltz jerry b. altzman "We've got to get in to get out" 212 854 8058 jbaltz@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu jauus@cuvmb (bitnet) ...!rutgers!columbia!cunixf!jbaltz (bang!) NEVIS::jbaltz (HEPNET)