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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Forth in Forth vs. Forth in assembly language
Message-ID: <9009220059.AA13835@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 21 Sep 90 23:30:27 GMT
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Reply-To: wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV
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>     This still leaves the question of whether it is more appealing to
>newcomers to have Forth written in Forth or in assembler.

There is no one answer.  It depends on the newcomer.

One problem with assembly language is that there are a lot of machines
these days which do not come with an assembler.  You can buy assemblers
for these machines, but they aren't necessarily compatible with one another.

Another problem is that there are a lot of people that do not know
assembly language.

A third problem is that assembly language is not portable across machines,
and if the entire kernel is written in assembler, porting to a new machine
involves rewriting the whole thing, not just the fundamental code words.

For a *lot* of newcomers, it is more appealing to have Forth written in C!

I sell quite a few copies of C Forth 83 into this market.


Personally, I think that typing in an assembly listing is an utter waste
of time.  It was okay back in FIG Forth days, when affordable computers
were wimpy and pretty much brain dead, and programmers were studly pioneers.
That situation was basically a glitch on the time line of history.

Unfortunately, a lot of Forth "culture" got "locked in" to that very
temporary set of tradeoffs.

Mitch