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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: BASIS Feedback
Message-ID: <1663.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 3 Sep 90 04:08:25 GMT
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Category 10,  Topic 35
Message 104       Fri Aug 31, 1990
D.RUFFER [Dennis]            at 13:16 EDT
 
From Elizabeth Rather, Chair, ANS X3J14 Technical Committee:

This is addressed to those who have been commenting extensively on our work on
UseNet and related boards.

We very much appreciate your interest.  I have circulated copies of many of
your comments in the TC.  I'd like to take the opportunity to try to clarify a
few things.

We fully appreciate the need for glossary descriptions to be clear and
unambiguous.  A great deal of our effort nowadays is devoted to that end.  You
can be a big help to us by pointing out descriptions that are unclear to you,
and (better still) proposing clearer wording.  It's very hard for the
author(s) of any document to judge its clarity.

We're not trying to convince anyone, Missourians or others, that what we have
is great.  What we now call BASIS is *not* a "proposed Standard."  It is the
TC's working draft.  We are aware that it has many deficiencies, and are
working very hard to remedy them.  When we believe we're done, we'll
immediately publish it as a dpANS ("draft proposed ANS").  We know we're not
done, and are looking for as much constructive feedback as we can get.  We are
three years, 13 meetings, downstream, however, and there are few issues we've
not addressed technically.  We are now working mainly on clarifications and
rationales, looking for unforeseen side effects, etc.

The following items are on our list of "burning issues" (areas with important
unresolved issues remaining):  input stream, files interface, arithmetic
(still!), appendices (several remain to be written, including Guidelines for
Implementors, a detailed Rationale and comparisons with FORTH83 and FORTH79),
multiprogramming, wordlists, and misc. cleanups and clarifications.  We have a
large number of pending proposals on all of these issues.

The most useful contribution is in the form of a proposed explicit change to
BASIS, accompanied by a publishable rationale that explains to us and the
world why that change was worth making.  We almost never pass proposals to add
lots of new words, because that's beyond our scope of work, and it's pretty
hard to act on general opinions not accompanied by a specific recommendation
(although we do circulate such comments, and read them carefully).
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