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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: X3J14 Goals
Message-ID: <1665.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 3 Sep 90 04:08:30 GMT
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 41

Category 10,  Topic 39
Message 1         Fri Aug 31, 1990
D.RUFFER [Dennis]            at 13:15 EDT
 
From Elizabeth Rather, Chair, ANS X3J14 Technical Committee:

What is our goal?  A good question, which we discuss among ourselves
frequently, in order to ensure we're making progress toward it.  At our
meeting last week we adopted the following restatements of it which will
appear in BASIS13 (language from Jim Rash, of NASA):

"The purpose of this standard is to promote portability of Forth programs for
use on a variety of computing systems, to facilitate communication of
programs, programming techniques, and ideas among Forth programmers, and to
serve as a basis for future evolution of the Forth language."

It's important to note that you will never write a program on ANS FORTH,
because ANS FORTH is a standard for Forth programming systems and not a system
itself.  You will write programs on an implementation that you select from
those available on the market, or which you will write yourself.  Any
implementation will include capabilities beyond ANS FORTH, and you may elect
to use those added capabilities or not as you see fit.  One of the things
we've learned is that insofar as one of the major areas of Forth use is in
embedded and real-time systems, most Forth programs are intrinsically non-
portable because of reliance on external hardware, optimization for
performance (e.g., assembler code), etc.  These are problems we can't solve. 
Nonetheless, a standard is useful for such systems by providing programmer
portability (easing the transition of a programmer from one implementation to
another).

All of this is equally true of C; the notion that all C programs are portable
is hogwash.  I'm aware of a recent project involving over $50K to be spent
converting a C program from one C compiler to another.  It is even more true
for C++, which is years away from any standard.

Also please remember that all we're standardizing is "Forth programming
systems," not the run-time nucleus.  That can be as stripped as you need it to
be.
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