Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!willett!ForthNet
From: ForthNet@willett.UUCP (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: BASIS Feedback
Message-ID: <1264.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jul 90 23:26:37 GMT
Organization: Latest link in the ForthNet chain.  (Pgh, PA)
Lines: 54

Category 10,  Topic 35
Message 100       Mon Jul 02, 1990
GARY-S                       at 06:55 EDT
 
              
  PORTED FROM Wetware =>
              -------

 #4.4 (4) by Luther Huffman (luther), on Sat Jun 30 07:09:47 1990:
    I agree about the government clauses. I wouldn't mind selling software to
  the government (to a limited extent I do!).  I wouldn't even mind selling 
  them Forth.
         I get a feeling though that lots of Forth'ers seem to feel it's a
  dying language and actually feel guilty about "propping" it up.  As an 
  outsider I feel that if they play their cards right and get a standard in
  place rather quickly, the best is yet to come! I develop cross-compilers and
  cross-assemblers for real-time applications.  I had been looking for 
  something beyond C but not quite Ada ($10,000 a pop to validate it!) well-
  suited for real-time stuff.  Quite frankly, I had been looking at Scheme, a
  nice, compact Lisp with lots of info in the public domain.  Starting about 
  a year ago though, lots of the "serious types" began to pay more attention
  to Forth. "Embedded Systems" magazine gives a tremendous amount of coverage
  to Forth (most of it positive).  Sun has made it their semi-official device
  driver  language and even implements their bus controllers in Forth.  Their
  toolkit for the SPARC machines even includes a Forth compiler.  
     Sun giving their seal of approval, in particular, gives me a lot of con-
  fidence about the future of Forth.

 Response by Gary Smith:
 >One of the reasons you see that Forth kernel buried in SPARC is because
 >one of SUN's gurus, Mitch Bradley, also haappens to be well recognized
 >for his contributions to the Forth community. Mitch knew going in what
 >sort of tools Forth would grant him.
 >  
 >Much to my personal dismay some of the standards people seem to want to
 >equip the ANS Standard with scheme and C type look and feel. I feel
 >this flies in the face of one of ANS's dictums.. ie: To conform as nearly
 >as possible to common practice.
 >There is also the matter of adding to and subtracting from the existing
 >language items to asuage a few - in other words creating a new similar
 >language as opposed to refining and standardizing the current usage.
 >  
 >A case in point is the effort to reintroduce 1's compliment arithmetic
 >algorithms. When was the last time you saw a computer of -ANY- type
 >rolled out with 1's compliment as part of its architecture ?
 >  
 >The one that really galls me is NOT. For twenty years 'NOT' has been a
 >simple boolean 'NOT'. No more. That's right, Luther. Not's not NOT any
 >more. A-R-R-R-G-H !
 >  gars
 >.
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