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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: OOF
Message-ID: <9008310101.AA27622@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 29 Aug 90 21:42:31 GMT
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Supposing we agree that Forth needs some sort of a standard for
object oriented programming:

	(If you don't agree, I don't want to hear about it.  Consider
	this a thought experiment; a "what if" scenario.)

There are 2 reasons why someone might agree with this:

	a) That person wants to participate in or direct the design of same,
	   and thus achieve, fame, fortune (ha!), and personal satisfaction.

	b) That person wants to be able to use object-oriented techniques
	   in Forth programs, with some degree of portability.

From recent messages, I suspect that motivation (a) is widespread.  More on
this later...

Now further suppose that we could manage to agree upon motivation (b) as
our "marching orders", and we wish to proceed in the direction most likely
to lead to our goal.  In that case, we should dispense with design quibbles.
We should evaluate *existing* OO Forth designs, particularly those which
have already been "proven" to some extent and those which are in widespread
(relatively speaking) use.  If we could find a basically sound candidate,
then we should work to make that a standard by writing articles, applications,
and implementations.

Here is a preliminary list: NEON, ODE (JForth; reportedly similar to NEON),
Boron (an implementation of NEON, with some divergence and some extensions),
FOOPS (HSForth), various implementation of Pountain's book.  I have seen
something for MacForth too, but I can't recall the name.  If I have left
some out, chalk it up to my ignorance and add to the list.

I claim that if we REALLY care about the effective result (a standard
OO extension for Forth), rather than about our personal research goals,
then this is the approach we should take.


Now, back to motivation (a) (research, personal fame).  I think that
a big proportion of the Forth community is motivated thus.  (I do not
claim to free of such leanings.)  I once had a discussion about Unix
with Chuck Moore.  Chuck objected to Unix on the grounds that he thought
that he could do a better job of writing many or all of the Unix utilities
and drivers, and didn't I think so too.  I replied that in a lot of cases
I could, but that had neither the time nor the desire to rewrite every bit
of software in the world.

So what will it be?  Shall we try to *select* an object oriented standard
as opposed to inventing one?  The existing ones are not all brain-damaged.

Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM