Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!ucbvax!MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM!wmb
From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: ANS Forth - summary of last week's meeting
Message-ID: <9006041403.AA15834@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 4 Jun 90 06:56:52 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Mitch Bradley <wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 25

> We'd love to, Mitch, only there is no room in the CORE wordset
> now that you have filled it up with your pet proposals! :-)

I know that this has a smiley on it, and was thus said at least partially
in jest, but I feel compelled to respond to it anyway, as things said in
jest are often important points stated politely.

I just want to point out that none of my pet proposals has added any
words to the CORE wordset.  Most of my activity has been confined to
optional wordsets (files, memory allocation, far memory, error handling).
Where I have been involved in the CORE wordset, it has been to improve
the wording or behavior of words that were already there.

This is an important point; it is salient to the "minimalism" vs.
"kitchen-sinkism" discussion.  The minimalists have a good argument that
a small core makes for compact implementations in resource-limited
environments.  I fully appreciate this, and that is why I have tried
to confine my extensions to *optional* wordsets, which can be omitted
in environments where they are inappropriate.

Let's keep the core of Forth small, but let's also proceed to standardize
some extensions.  Those of us who need them can then all "pull in the same
direction".

Mitch Bradley