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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: USER INTERFACE
Message-ID: <9101031510.AA12060@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 2 Jan 91 19:23:45 GMT
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Reply-To: wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV
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This is a followup to some information provided by Ray Duncan; the quoted
parts are his.  My goal in this followup is further support my contention
that a published standard for the Forth language as a whole (e.g. ANS Forth)
is the ONLY effective way to achieve widespread standardization of any
aspect of Forth, including extensions.  (I am not aware that Ray necessarily
disputes this contention; I am simply using his comments as a springboard
for mine.)

> we didn't arrive at our current stdio-type
> interface until about 1986 after we had done a couple of custom ports
> to UNIX systems and saw the need for a file interface that would map
> easily onto DOS, UNIX, OS/2, Macintosh, Atari ST, and whatever else.
> I guess this was about the same time frame as you started promoting
> this concept at FORML etc. ...

Actually, I started in 1983 (wordset and portable implementation of Forth
"standard I/O", including code for 2 processors and 2 operating systems,
published in FORML 83.  The implementation supports both data access and
compilation.)

> since I don't attend Forth hobbyist
> events I didn't become aware of your work immediately.
> ...
> the papers at FORML and similar events often show a shocking
> ignorance of what people are doing with Forth in commercial
> systems.

I'm not so surprised that people are ignorant of what is happening in
commercial systems, because a lot of that information is not published
except as part of products.  Few people can afford to purchase one copy
of every commercial system.

The thing that surprises me is that people don't do literature searches,
so even when something is published, people don't know about it.

So, for whatever reasons, many people remain unaware of what is going on
in other parts of the Forth community.  The only document that every
implementor seems to read is the latest Forth language standard.

> In another message, you mentioned that the Forth Vendors Group
> Floating Point Standard has not been heard of lately.  This is true
> but I believe (or at least hope) that the word set defined in that
> document is still widely used.  We use it, anyway.

Yes, I use it too.  I was very glad when it was published, because I didn't
want to invent yet another FP interface wordset.  In mentioning the FVG
Floating Point wordset, I was not trying to deprecate it in any way.
Instead, I was using it as an example of an "informal" standard that was
published, implemented, and widely used, yet it appeared to largely
unknown among ForthNet participants (at least nobody had mentioned it).

Thus, I stand firm in my contention that:

        "grass roots" "standardization" is ineffective in the Forth
        community as a whole.

This is one of my primary justifications for my efforts toward adding
extension wordsets to ANS Forth.

Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM