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From: dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: ANS FORTH TECHNICAL COMMITTEE
Message-ID: <2326.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 11 Feb 91 12:42:04 GMT
References: <2301.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 33

In article <2301.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>,
	ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (really Frank Sergeant) writes:
>        I think it is far too  soon to "standardize" Forth.  When I offer my
> opinions about ( y x -)  versus ( x y -) or decimal points, etc they are
> merely my current  thinking.  I am not through thinking.  I don't want any of
> this frozen  into a "standard" yet.

This attitude would be amusing were not so prevalent.  Why is that
standardizing Forth (as it exists now) in any way prevents more thinking?
Did any of the previous standards do that?  Why would this standard be
different?  Personally I would like to see a standard to address many of the
things that have been added since Forth-83 (and to undo some blunders).
But what I really really want is a way to write Forth code that will run on
more than one Forth and more than one processor, without having to provide
all the tedious prolog code.  I would like a language to write "examples" in,
that are not even going to be read by a machine, in order to communicate
more coherently with other Forth programmers.  But, Portability is my main
interest in this ANSI process.

>      However, I am fully convinced there is going to be an ANSI  "standard"
> regardless of how premature I feel it to be.  So, I think  the important thing
> now is not to call it *the* standard, but to refer  to it as *one of the many
> competing* standards.  Sort of my version of  pantheism.  So, regarding it as
> one of the many standards, I can say to  the committee "good work - keep it up
> - the ideas and discussion are  useful."  I look at it as an expensive to
> them, cheap to me version of  FORML.  

I have never understood why anyone would ever think that ANSI-FORTH would be
anything but "*one of the many competing*" standards.

-Doug
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