Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!shakti!shri
From: shri@ncst.ernet.in (H.Shrikumar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Interpret/compile consistency
Message-ID: <979@shakti.ncst.ernet.in>
Date: 2 Oct 90 11:57:21 GMT
References: <9009220119.AA14290@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: shri@shakti (H.Shrikumar )
Organization: National Centre for Software Technology, Bombay, INDIA
Lines: 36

In article <9009220119.AA14290@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> 
  wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV writes:
>
>>   How about?   IF [ : ... ; ] THEN
>>   Or?   IF [ : ... [ : ... ; ] ... ; ] THEN    8^)
>
>No
>
>Nested brackets, and colon definitions nested within control structures,
>are outside the scope of what I was trying to accomplish.  In order to
>support nested brackets/colon-definitions, one must dispense with the
>traditional notion of STATE as a global variable.  

   I plan to do this in myForth. Well, actually I am trying to get rid 
of STATE. The definition of a word in myForth is allowed to have other
word definitions within, Pascal style, recursively. 

   Dictionary searches while compiling a word begin with the local
definitions which therefore over-ride the top-level definition of
the same ideogram.

   The compiler is not overly complicated, since I have precisely
one context-free construct ( ... ). While compiling, myForth 
compiler would first compile the innermost definition, and proceed
outward in level of nested parens.

   The link field of each top-level ideogram would skip all the
local definitions and keep them invisible.

   Am I headed for big trouble with this ? 
(This being my first go a post-fixing, I am a bit nervous.)

-- shrikumar ( shri@ncst.in )

   Disclaimer: myForth is just in the works, admittedly my syntax needs
some more cleaning up, so I avoid giving a concrete example at this stage.