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From: wmb@pi.Eng.Sun.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: ANS Forth - the light at the end of the tunnel
Message-ID: <136528@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 1 Jun 90 18:46:19 GMT
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Lines: 44

> John Wavrik writes, regarding ANS Forth ...
> just waiting for someone to tell us he sees light at the end of the
> tunnel!

Okay, here goes:

	I see light at the end of the tunnel.

Seriously, I am quite pleased at the current state of affairs.

All of the "stupid quibbles", like "NOT" and "/", have been resolved in
a workable fashion (i.e. precisely-defined standard words are provided for
all reasonable behaviors, so everybody can do what they need to do, and
the controversial names are left loosely defined so that vendors don't
refuse to implement the standard on "cost of compliance" grounds).

Important and *necessary* extension packages are defined, including
file access, floating point, memory allocation, strings, search order,
and error handling.  These are optional, so nobody is forced to implement
them, but at least there will no longer be one million incompatible variants
of stuff that many people eventually end up needing.

Usage restrictions on standard words have been articulated, so now it is
possible to KNOW what you can depend on, instead of having to guess.

Admittedly, there are some restrictions that keep me from writing
certain programs portably (mostly in the area of syntactic extensions,
or "mucking around in the kernel"), but this is nothing new.  Such
programs have ALWAYS been system-dependent (yes, I know that you could
do a lot of neat stuff as long as you restricted yourself to FIG Forth,
but FIG Forth NEVER was the only Forth, and hasn't even been all that
important for over 8 years).

All in all, I think ANS Forth, as it stands RIGHT NOW (Basis 12), is a
GOOD THING.  I'm going to vote for it.  I'm proud to have been involved.

Admittedly, there are a few things that I would have done a bit differently,
had I been the ANS Forth Dictator.  Fortunately, I am not the Dictator,
and neither is anybody else.  The result is a compromise.  It's a good
compromise, and I can live with it.  Many conflicting interests were
well and fairly represented.  The result is a language that I will be
happy to use.

Mitch Bradley