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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: CASE
Message-ID: <9101140259.AA12136@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 13 Jan 91 10:02:04 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Mitch Bradley <wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 30

It doesn't seem like such a bad thing if the name "CASE" is restricted
to mean just one thing; there are lots of other names that can be used
for other kinds of multi-way selection data structures.  How about
SELECTS or SWITCH or CHOICES or SELECTOR or JUMP-TABLE: or CASE: or
whatever.  Heck, CASE really isn't that good of a name anyway; it just
happens to be what some other language (Pascal? Algol? I forget) uses
(it's not C; C uses "switch" at the top and "case" where Eaker uses "OF").

To my way of thinking, it is far worse for us as a community to adopt the
attitude "let's all pick our own personal meanings for the same word".

A word only has value to the extent that multiple people agree on its
meaning.  Vague meanings like "well it is probably some sort of selection
among several alternatives, but only the author knows for sure what it
does to the stack" don't cut the mustard for something as precise
as computer programming.  If they did, then we'd have no need for Forth
because computers would be programmed in some (ambiguous, ubiquitous)
natural language like English .

The Forth word CASE has more value to the Forth community if ANS Forth
declares it to mean Eaker's case than it has as a 4-letter identifier
that you can use to mean your own private thing.  I haven't run up
against a shortage of unique identifiers lately, and my systems are so
big that C. Moore litmus judges them to be "not worth doing" (although
his latest chip finally has enough address bits to support them!).

Cheese louise, why are people so jealous about a few names?  The name
space is huge.

Mitch