Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!willett!dwp
From: dwp@willett.UUCP (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Purity of essence
Message-ID: <1448.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
Date: 2 Aug 90 02:25:48 GMT
References: <9007310619.AA15045@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 39

In <9007310619.AA15045@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM writes:

> True only if you accept the proposition that it is the editor's job to
> paper-over the deficiencies of BLOCKs.  Even a super-duper editor won't
> correct the major deficiency of BLOCKs, which is that they make Forth into
> an island in itself, preventing easy interoperability with all the
> thousands of file-based programs available outside of the Forth world.

This leads me to a side point.  Which is more fundamental?  That is
which is more appropriately "built from" the other?

	A sequence of 1024 byte blocks, or
	A stream of bytes.
	
Conceptually, the stream of bytes seems more fundamental because it is more
general.  Practically, blocks seem better matched to the underlying media.
Of course, that is only an ephemeral match that will last so long as the
media technologies are like they are now.

>                                         Unfortunately, there are important
> omissions from most Forth standards in this area [Vocabularies]:
> 	a) No standard way to programmatically enumerate the words in
> 	   a vocabulary (i.e. the primitives you need to build VLIST
> 	   or WORDS)
> 	b) No standard way to save and restore the search order.
> 	c) No standard way to selectively remove a single word from a
> 	   vocabulary.
> 	d) No standard way to search just one vocabulary.

I'm curious if anyone knows of a system that does these things?  Would
it still be Forth as we know it?  Are vocabularies *really* part of
Forth, or something that is added on on top of it?  Not dictionaries,
vocabularies.

-Doug

---
Preferred: willett!dwp@hobbes.cert.sei.cmu.edu OR ...!sei!willett!dwp
Daily: ...!{uunet,nfsun}!willett!dwp   [in a pinch: dwp@vega.fac.cs.cmu.edu]