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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: PYGMY Forth
Message-ID: <1553.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 20 Aug 90 00:41:28 GMT
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 48

Category 1,  Topic 45
Message 34        Sun Aug 19, 1990
F.SERGEANT [Frank]           at 13:24 CDT
 
 To Chris Waters     1 of 2
 CW>I haven't seen BASIS yet ...  Ghod I hope they gave up on floored 
 CW>division.  :)

 I can't imagine what you are talking about.  The standards committee  is
composed of the finest minds in the Forth community.  They have the 
experience, insight, and level-headedness to optimize the standards  process. 
In addition, they are completely in touch with the vendors  and, through the
vendors, with all the customers (the users of Forth)  of the vendors.  Those
customers are countable.  By that I mean, the  committee can say "so many per
cent of all Forth users are now using  [floored division or zero'd division or
this vocabulary structure or  ...]."  I believe it is through this method that
they are able to  determine that the Forth-83 standard was NOT a success as it
is NOT  used by almost all the customers of the vendors, and therefore the 
current committee cannot merely update the Forth-83 standard with minor 
changes (such as "like, we said 16 bits - well, like, do it with 32  bits if
you want to, No Problem!").  Without this countability it would  be much more
difficult to determine that Forth-83 was so terribly  unacceptable to so many
people.

    I can just hear you complaining now that this method of counting  excludes
the few users of L&P's F83 (and the few users of its few  derivatives such as
F83X, Y, etc & F-PC), some of which probably DO  find the Forth-83 standard
acceptable.  Surely, and the sample made up  from the vendors' to represent
all of them.  Besides, on another level,  these people (users of non-Vended
systems) may REALLY not count.  (If  the current countable Forth users are not
felt to be a sufficiently  large sample, users of C and Pascal could be
considered as well, I  suppose.)

     Of course, in the previous paragragh I'm not being entirely  serious, or
fair.  More and more, as I search for my "perfect" Forth, I  see very similar
problems to those facing the standards committee.  Further, various of its
members such as Mitch Bradley, post messages  that explain courteously, and at
length, the reasoning and pressures  behind their decisions.  I find I have to
agree with them in many ways.  If I were on the committee I would probably say
ok ok I'm tired, let's  finish it.  I would like to see an (accurate) press
release that says  "the entire Forth community met to consider a standard and
agreed  unanimously not to even HAVE a standard."   But, I suppose it wouldn't
 be unamimous.

  -- Frank
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