Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!cis.udel.edu From: carroll@cis.udel.edu (Mark Carroll) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Files VS Blocks, a compromise Message-ID: <33553@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Date: 16 Oct 90 01:01:16 GMT References: <3540@mindlink.UUCP> Sender: usenet@ee.udel.edu Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 35 Nntp-Posting-Host: apollo.cis.udel.edu In article <3540@mindlink.UUCP> a684@mindlink.UUCP (Nick Janow) writes: > >Click on a word, and a window with that word's words pops up, Click again, and >the stack effect pops up. Another window shows a graph of resources used by >the word. > >C'mon FORTHers, this is the 90's: the Information Age. Let's take the leading >edge of programming! > >Now all we need is for someone to write a smart editor to do this, with little >effort required from the user. Shareware or Freeware please. :-) Don't laugh - I'm actually thinking about doing something like this. I've had this idea in the back of my mind, for a long time, to create myself a language that would really let me take advantage of my style of hacking. The only thing stopping me from starting it was an uncertainty about exactly what I wanted out of the language. Forth has always interested me, because it's a very simple, flexible model of programming. But (please, don't flame me!!) it's always had a rather clunky, archaic feel to it. You're locked into this dreadful screens model, which I hate, and you have no built in way of handling data structures, which I feel are a necessity. Then, about a week ago, I found Fifth. Fifth is FAR from what I'm looking for, but it gave me the ideas that I needed. I still want more from the language: I want to be able to have a module export more than one word, I want data structures, etc. But the basic model is wonderful. What I'm looking at doing is implementing something like Fifth, with a lot of extensions, but still based on the same Forth model, only with a fancy xwindows browser programming interface.