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From: heron@mars.jpl.nasa.gov (Vance Heron)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: PYGMY Forth
Message-ID: <1990Sep21.224812.26771@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: 21 Sep 90 22:48:12 GMT
References: <1778.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
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Reply-To: heron@mars.jpl.nasa.gov (Vance Heron)
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In article <1778.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us> ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie) writes:
>Category 1,  Topic 45
>Message 44        Wed Sep 19, 1990
>F.SERGEANT [Frank]           at 23:07 CDT
> 
>Forth vs Assembly Language
>
>
>     This still leaves the question of whether it is more appealing to 
>newcomers to have Forth written in Forth or in assembler.  If they have  no
>interest in Forth I don't see how having Forth written in assembler  is going
>to create that interest.  If they do have an interest in  Forth, I think
>they'd be more interested in seeing Forth written in  itself.  Of course, the
>EForth and figForth approach of giving them  both would seem to satisfy
>everyone.
>
Let me take a stab at answering this - 
I am slightly more than a novice in forth, but I have written
some applications in it  including a Control Program for an Infrared 
Camera currently in use on the Mt Palomar 200" telescope and other
applications to test Millitary Communications Equipment (Air Farce)

Anyway - I'm not sure a novice really cares about either, but after
working/playing with it for a while I got interested in "rolling my
own" and was disappointed that none of the smaller forths I got
included source code that would enable one to start from scratch
(i.e. assembly).

Because the interpreter is such an integral part of forth, it
seems much less "satisfying" to write forth in forth (as opposed
to writing a C compiler in C).  I had the fortune to be able
to do just that in my college days, but the resulting code was
MACHINE LANGUAGE - I could use C on one machine to write a
compler that would run on a different one - once I had cross
compiled the compiler - I would have a native compiler on the
new machine (I didn't do all this, but is seemed feasable ?!?)

Given a Forth system like PYGMY (I really love it - thank you Frank)
how could I port it to a 68000 box ???  How did Frank get his 1st
interpreter up so he could interpret the rest ??  Given my almost
novice status I probably am missing something - but I think
assembly would help a larger group of programmers - if one is not
interested in Forth, they wont bother to look for source in either
language, and if one is interested in "building" a new forth, the
ability to start from scratch will probably be wanted/needed.

Just my $0.02

Vance
heron@mars.jpl.nasa.gov