Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!UTRCGW.UTC.COM!RAYBRO%UTRC
From: RAYBRO%UTRC@UTRCGW.UTC.COM ("William R Brohinsky", ay)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: C compared to Forth
Message-ID: <9009251550.AA11172@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 25 Sep 90 14:47:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28

Ken Kubiak asks
``...it is possible to make Forth higher level than C...But is that
language still Forth?''

My answer, based on my own humble opinion, is `yes', as long as the
programmer still has access to the inner interpreter and dictionary,
and can still create his own structures, constructs, and do the other
things that make Forth Forth. If the higher level language implemented
in Forth discludes these aspects of programming from the programmer,
then you have implemented the higher level language. This is just like
writing a C compiler in assembler. It stops being an assembler when you
shut off access to the assembler, i.e., assembling the code into the
C compiler. If you implement C in forth, but do not shut down the
interpreters and limit access to extending the dictionary, it is still
Forth, albeit with the additional constructs of C.

When I was in communication with ECFB, many years ago (about three...),
Someone there told me that they'd implemented LISP on a forth engine, and
that it ran faster than any Lisp engine they'd had experience with. I don't
know the metrics, and the speed stuff is really peripheral to this message,
but his remarks about how it was easier to write the code to make a LISP
compiler than to write LISP code got me thinking. If he'd left the FORTH
language available under the LISP language (which, in fact, he might just
have done) I think it would still be FORTH.

What do y'all think?

raybro