Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM!wmb
From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: 1990 FORML
Message-ID: <9012031432.AA22000@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 3 Dec 90 05:48:43 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Mitch Bradley <wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 70

> Two outstanding events occurred at FORML:
>     1. Glen Haydon plopped an alligator onto an overhead projector.

Actually, as I recall, it was Leonard Morgenstern that used the
alligator (it was a pun on "allocator").


>     2. Mitch Bradley sang.

If you can call it that.


> If I do attend again, I hope I'll remember to arrive thoroughly  rested.
> ...
> each night we adjourned to someone's  room where the party continued.
> I don't know how late, as I tried to  get to bed by 2 am and I wasn't the
> last to leave.

I used to do that, but I finally realized that I consistently got ill from
lack of rest after returning home from FORML.  It is possible to bail out
of the party and go to bed around midnight; the down side is that you don't
get to experience 20 or 30 people crammed into one hotel room.


>   1. The size and direction of F-PC.  We've already got Turbo Pascal  and
> Turbo C.

To each his own.  Nobody forces anybody to use F-PC.


>   3. That a senior Forth Inc person thinks Forth is NOT the computer
> programming language to teach his child.

I believe he said that Forth is not the *first* language he would
teach his child.  I can see his point; to use Forth, there is a fair
amount of nitty-gritty that you have to learn.  I think Logo is a better
choice for a first language.  Forth was not designed for teachability,
but instead for useability for real-world engineering problems, and it
shows.  Forth is full of tedious-to-explain kludges that turn out to
be reasonable tradeoffs under certain sets of non-obvious constraints.
A child would not be expected to care about speed or space efficiency
or many of the other things that recommend Forth over other "cleaner"
interactive languages.


>   4. I think it is absurd to distribute eforth as a MASM listing.  One  of
> the assumptions made is that recipients will already have a  PC/XT/AT
> available.

Hear, hear.  Does it bother anybody besides me that, with eForth distributed
in MASM, Bill Gates stands to make money on Forth too, and worse yet, on
Forth used on non-80x86 processors?

A much better approach, in my entirely selfish opinion, would be to
write it in retargetable metacompiler form (it goes without saying that
my metacompiler is retargetable), with the metacompiler running on top of
my C Forth 83 (which has been trivially ported to dozens of machines from
PCs to all flavors of Unix machines to VAXen to mainframes).  I would
venture to guess that there are more people who know C than who know MASM.
Besides which, C Forth 83, at $50, is cheaper than MASM (Microsoft doesn't
sell anything for less than $50, do they?).  End self-serving-but-reasonably-
cogent argument.

> (Of  course, I hope no one will agree with me.)

Is it okay to agree with some few of your points?  If not, I apologize.


Cheers,
Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM


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