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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: ANS FORTH TECHNICAL COMMITTEE
Message-ID: <2341.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 14 Feb 91 02:29:28 GMT
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 44


 Date: 02-11-91 (18:29)              Number: 1135 of 1138
   To: GARY SMITH                    Refer#: 1095
 From: CHRIS WATERS                    Read: NO
 Subj: Ans Forth Technical Commi     Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE
 Conf: FORTH (58)                 Read Type: GENERAL (+)

 Reply to: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
  Subject: Recent ANS Forth Meeting

 > Conditional compilation:
 >    A wordset for conditional compilation is going out for letter
 >    ballot. It looks like it may pass.  The proposal calls for
 >    fully-nestable, immediate words IFTRUE OTHERWISE IFEND (same
 >    names as in Forth 83).

 I have to ask about this one.  What about the simpler methods of
 conditional compiliation.  Have these all been rejected?  Why do we have
 to have the huge overhead of IFTRUE and such, rather than something
 simple and elegant, such as query-paren.

 Color me a minimalist, but I don't see the point of IFTRUE.  I first
 implemented one in my Forth back in '81, but I've never used it, and I
 dropped from the system around '84.  Query-paren, or something similar,
 is much faster and takes almost no overhead.  My vote is to leave this
 [censored] for the pascal and basic programmers.

 p.s. these names were NOT part of the '83 standard per se.  They WERE
 included in the reference wordset, along with such winners as END and
 semi-colon-colon.  I considered them archaic back then, and even more
 archaic now.
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