Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM!wmb
From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Nuke separate CONTEXT and CURRENT
Message-ID: <9003271432.AA19673@jade.berkeley.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 90 04:29:53 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 27

I have recently begun to think that the notion of separate search
(CONTEXT) and compilation (CURRENT) vocabularies is bogus.

Back in the old days, before run-time search order specification
(ALSO/ONLY), separate search and compilation vocabularies may have
bought you something worthwhile, but I'm not sure just what.

These days, they just make things confusing, especially considering the
Forth-83 requirement that : must set CONTEXT to CURRENT .

I recently implemented a mechanism that used Forth vocabularies to
implement a tree-structed name space.  I set it up so that when you
added a vocabulary to the search order, it automatically set the
compilation vocabulary too.  It sure made things simpler to thing about.

Can anybody think of some arguments in favor of the separation of
CONTEXT and CURRENT ?  I would particularly like to hear of commonly-
occurring situations where the separation helps, but strange or uncommon
situations might be interesting as well.

How about historical arguments?

I have just about convinced myself that there is no absolute need for the
separation, since it is always possible to explicitly set the search
order to any desired order at any time, perhaps inside brackets ( [ .. ] ).

Mitch Bradley