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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: C compared to Forth
Message-ID: <9008111941.AA11132@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 11 Aug 90 04:58:13 GMT
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> I would be more inclined to put C and Forth at about the same level.
> If you look at the language itself and not the libraries.  I say that
> because while PD or ShareWare versions of Forth are pretty bare bones,
> so are most PD or ShareWare C's.

Except that why would anybody bother with a PD or shareware C when you can
get Turbo C (which is a dynamite product) for about $100?  If your time
is worth anything at all, the price is worth it many times over.

The only freely-available C worth bothering with is Gnu C, which isn't
barebones by any stretch of the imagination.  (It also doesn't run on PC's).

Few people bother with stripped-down C these days.

> Anyway, from the ads I've seen, the libraries available for Forth are
> comparable to those available for C.

With one important difference: the C libraries are all more or less (usually
more) compatible with one another, whereas every Forth library is pretty
much an island to itself.

> As a side note, it tickles me to see the ratio of PD/ShareWare Forths to
> C's versus the ratio for commercial products.

Actually, it bothers me, because that means that basically nobody can make
a living selling Forth, which means that few marketing dollars are going
to be spent, which means that Forth may be doomed in the long run.  Idealistic
principles aside, economics makes the world go round.  The only company in
recent memory that has spent significant marketing dollars on Forth is Harris.
I wonder if they would do it again?


Of course, none of this in any way invalidates the author's point, which is
that C and Forth are about on the same "level" in some linguistic sense.
I'd pretty much agree with this, although I would claim that the "level"
of C is more "fixed" than Forth, at least in terms of how people actually
use it.

Mitch