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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Metacompilation
Message-ID: <2403.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 21 Feb 91 23:30:48 GMT
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 43

Category 3,  Topic 27
Message 57        Sat Feb 23, 1991
F.SERGEANT [Frank]           at 15:25 CST
 
 >... the advantages of FOR .. NEXT over DO .. LOOP are just not great 
 >enough to justify all the fuss and effort of changing it.
 .
 For me, personally, it was well worth my changing to FOR ... NEXT.   Whether
the ANSI standards committee should recognize it yet as  standard Forth is
another question.  I have previously suggested that  FOR ... NEXT may be too
new, and therefore not yet part of standard  Forth at all.  I think it will
become standard Forth eventually.
 .
 >There is one serious problem with FOR .. NEXT nowadays:  I don't know 
 >what it means anymore.  It's original meaning is to execute the loop 
 >n+1 times, but now in Rob's and Frank's systems, it executes n times.
 .
 Yes, this concerns me as well.  This is another reason I might prefer  to
omit FOR ... NEXT from the ANSI standard until experience throughout  the
Forth community shakes this out.  I am very happy that FOR should  execute the
loop u times rather than u+1 times.  The compromise I've  reached with myself
over this is that on occasion I may have to explain  which FOR is meant.  I
feel FOR ... NEXT is still too new to say that  such a long tradition already
exists for u+1 that an inferior name (  such as ?FOR) must be chosen for the
preferred action.
 .
 >(There is one less-serious problem too: what is the name of the FOR 
 >.. NEXT loop index?).
 .
 Yes, I am not completely insensitive to this as a problem for people  who use
both DO ... LOOP and FOR ... NEXT.  I'm only using FOR ... NEXT  and so have
no problem calling the index I.  At the same time, the  weight of tradition
leads me to accept that I is the standard name for  DO ... LOOP's index. 
Perhaps over the years as and if FOR ... NEXT  becomes standard, so will its
index's name.  I'm starting in that  direction by using I for FOR ... NEXT and
nothing for DO ... LOOP, and  acknowledge that my usage is not yet standard.
 .
 -- Frank
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