Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!midway!linac!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!VANDVMS1.BITNET!REEVES From: REEVES@VANDVMS1.BITNET ("Terry W. Reeves") Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: ANS efforts Message-ID: <9010311403.AA07645@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 29 Oct 90 23:48:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: "Terry W. Reeves" Organization: The Internet Lines: 30 I have read a number of messages recently attacking compromises the ANS Technical Committee has made in order to produce a standard. The most recent concerns VOCABULARY. Before that it was / and MOD. Before that it was .... I personally support these compromises. While they may not always be the best solution available by any given group's criteria, they do tend to solve what I consider to be two very crucial problems. 1) They allow me to write a program that will hopefully be able to run on a wide range of hardware platforms with many different Forth systems while at the same time 2) not breaking programs that have always run in the past. I have learned to detest having to fix code that worked last week or last month or last year simply because the underlying system changed. If I was told by the vendor of my software that I would have to change years of software that was debugged and working just because certain Forth words that were being used had changed in some nontrivial way, I would at least entertain the idea of using some other vendor's package. Therefore, if I were the vendor of some package that had a substantial number of users, I would resist any effort create a standard that would force me or my users to choose between a package that conforms to the standard and one that does not. With the compromises, I can write new code using the standard as much as possible so that it will be as portable as possible, and I will be able to continue to run old programs with the same package. I have heard very similar arguments from a representative of DEC at a Computing in High Energy Physics conference at to why they were opposed to certain changes that might be made to the FORTRAN- 8X standard. They were simply trying to make sure that old Fortran code that dated back to the 60's would still work. They did not want to lose those customers. As for myself, I would not want to have to change thousands upon thousands of lines of Fortran to conform to a new standard, nor would I want to have to support two Fortran compilers. Terry Reeves