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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: What are the existing standards?
Message-ID: <1893.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 21 Oct 90 01:58:53 GMT
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 93

Category 10,  Topic 1
Message 22        Mon Oct 15, 1990
D.RUFFER [Dennis]            at 23:46 EDT
 
Re: B.RODRIGUEZ2 [Brad]

 > > Can you give me an example Brad?
 >
 > Offhand?  How about WORDLIST for VOCABULARY, and ADDITIONS for
 > DEFINITIONS?

I know you have seen polyFORTH.  How can you say that it declares vocabularies
in any way similar to any other Forth?  Some implementations don't even have
vocabularies.  I guess I just haven't seen the commonality that you are
alluding to.

 > I would argue that CHAR is an example, although I realize ASCII
 > was never formally adopted anywhere -- it was just a widely
 > accepted informal standard. (A pity those aren't recognized more
 > often.)

ASCII is only the standard in America (e.g. the A in ASCII).  ANS Forth is
attempting to be more international, and thus has settled on the IRV character
set.  What would they say?  ASCII defines an IRV character?  <yuck>

 > > lack of error recovery?

 > Really?  Can you tell me who's been doing this laughing, and why
 > C and Pascal were never objects of their ridicule?

I don't know about Pascal, but even C has the "setjump" concepts. Even BASIC
has ON ERROR procedures.  I am very surprised that you have never heard people
laugh at our "?" error message (it is the only one we've got :-).  Maybe we
have just been talking to different people.

 > Are these the kind of people who should decide a national
 > standard?

I don't know!  I didn't "elect" them.  Nobody did, but they have proved their
"value" by putting up the time and expense of participation.  Thus, they are
the ones who get to decide.

 > If you were designing a new language, would you make "true" -1 or
 > +1?  What would you have done if you hadn't experienced both in
 > the Forth community?

Personally, I saw nothing wrong with saying that true was non-zero. That way
an implementation could choose whatever they needed for efficiency.  However,
programmers are lazy, and standards are weak. Thus you get people multiplying
boolians because AND works on bits and others insisting that true must have
all bits on so that AND works.  What to do...what to do?

In other languages, boolians are not confused with bits.  A strongly typed
language would not have this problem.  Usually, it doesn't even matter if a
logical flag is implemented with 1 or 0 bits representing the true state.  The
logical tests know the difference. However, Forth does not type its operators,
and AND can be used as a logical operator or as a bit mask.  Historically, we
have agreed that 0 is false and we have a strong desire that AND works in both
modes.  Thus true must be -1, but the conversion was still painful.

Personally, I rejoiced when the 83 standard "fixed" this problem, and I will
rejoice again, if the problems with error recovery can be "fixed" by ANS
Forth.

 > BTW, I note that the proposal/comment form is no longer included
 > in the BASIS distribution, and hasn't been for some time now.

Do you think the form has changed?  It has not!  The same one that appear in
the original BASIS documents, that appeared in Forth Dimensions, that is even
available here on GEnie (I forget the file name right now) still works today. 
I don't know why it was removed, but it sure makes sense.

 > The "proposal log", a useful innovation which appeared briefly
 > around BASIS10, is now gone too.  *Sigh*

The proposals affecting the current version are still included.  The full list
is much too lengthy to distribute and means nothing without the actual text of
the proposals.

 > Does this mean it's too late to comment on BASIS12?

BASIS 12 is obsolete as of the last meeting.  Proposals should now be directed
at BASIS 13 which is available now.

 > According to MINUTES.13, the BASIS12 document has been officially
 > adopted now.

adopted and changed!

DaR
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