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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: To chuck or not?
Message-ID: <9102122125.AA04897@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 12 Feb 91 18:42:55 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Mitch Bradley <wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 31

> ``I beg to differ.  ... The one
> ``thing I find missing and can't figure out how to synthesize is
> ``something like the eiffle retry semantics.
> ``
> ``the fact that  we can think of problems with a part of the standard is no
> ``reason to chuck that part.
>
> Au contraire... the fact that ``we can think of problems with a part
> of the standard'' is _absolutely_ reason enough to ``chuck'' that
> part.  Only those things that are proven aspects of Forth should be
> standardized as part of ANS Forth (in my heretical opinion).

No way, Jose.  I can think of problems with just about *every* aspect
of Forth.  There is no such thing as a word that does everything well.

Should we chuck "DO .. LOOP" and "CREATE" and "ALLOT" and ":" ?  The
problems with those words are a lot more severe than the problems with
CATCH/THROW.

We don't chuck Newtonian mechanics because it ultimately fails to work
in relativistic situations.  In 99.9% of the cases, it is exactly what
you want.  Similarly CATCH/THROW solves the problem it was intended to
solve, and solves it quite well.  A lot of people think that problem is
worth solving (I have the email to prove it), and those people that don't
like it are encouraged to ignore the ERROR wordset and do whatever kind
of error handling they want.

I have a hard time respecting the "I don't like it, so you can't have it"
attitude.

Mitch