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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: ANSI and Hidden Assumptions
Message-ID: <9101282213.AA19376@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 27 Jan 91 05:51:55 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36

Please, people, can we get specific?  If there are specific problems,
let's get them out in the open where we can address them.

All of Basis 14 has been subject to close scrutiny by somewhere between
20 and 40 rather competent Forth programmers, and has been implemented
by at least 2 different people.  That certainly doesn't mean it is
flawless, but it does lead me to believe that it's probably not horribly
broken.  (Specific, verifyable evidence to the contrary will be most
carefully considered; I personally volunteer to "carry the banner" for
any such issue that is brought to my attention).

At this point, there's just nothing I or anybody else can do with vague,
unspecified worries, nor with philosophical "soapboxes".  The time for
philosophy has passed.  Basis is going to dpANS soon, and whether you
like it or not, and whether or not it passes and becomes an official
standard, it *will* be very influential.  So, working on that assumption,
it behooves us to find and fix as many specific problems as we can find.

I would further suggest that, from a practical standpoint, that we agree
to concentrate on "incremental modifications", rather than profound
changes.  All the profound decisions have already been argued about
for 4.5 years, and the die has been cast (at some point, you just have to
make a decision and go with it, and that point has passed).

So, my challenge to the ForthNet community is this: find something
objectively wrong with Basis, support your claim with facts, submit
a proposal, and I will do my best to get the issue resolved.

(Oh, one more suggestion: proposals of the form "it would be nice to
have word X" (where word X can be easily implemented in terms of
existing words) don't have much chance these days, in part due to a
widespread desire to minimize the size of the standard.  However, very
careful consideration is given to proposals to the effect that:
"there is no way to do `x', and `x' is important because ...")

Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM