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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Forth calls C
Message-ID: <9102151415.AA00889@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 14 Feb 91 22:13:30 GMT
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Reply-To: wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28

> There is one way I could agree to shrinking the ANSI wordset
> thereby eliminating all of these controversies over the string or file
> or ... wordsets.  Define a standard way of calling C functions from
> forth.  Then anyone could use all the functions in libc.a or any other C
> library and not need to reinvent the wheel (or words) in forth.
> Think about it, interface to C in an standard sequence and all the
> issues of strings, files, floating point, networking, GUI are
> mostly solved.  Use the C names, with the C specified arguments in a
> forth context. real easy.  But I figure this will never fly because
> the forth hackers of the world have their egos too wrapped up
> in reinventing the wheel in the forth way to get any real work done
> and make money using forth.

Many of my Forth products have this capability, but it is a major-league
support headache.  The problem is the diversity of calling conventions
and linker formats across different machines, across different C
implementations on the same machine, and even across different sets
of system routines supplied by the system vendor.

For instance, the Atari ST has about 5 different system interface levels,
each with different calling conventions, not to mention the 3 or 4 different
C compilers that have been popular at various times in the machines lifetime.

Even OS-9, which is in general a very well-designed operating system, has
about 4 or 5 different linkage mechanisms for various system interface
components.

Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM