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From: dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Conditional compilation
Message-ID: <2427.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 27 Feb 91 19:51:25 GMT
References: <9102250350.AA26430@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 32

In article <9102250350.AA26430@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, 
	wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) writes:
> .IF .ELSE .THEN are nice names.  Personally, I agree that [IF] etc are
> more obvious, and also "[]" has less of a tendency to "get lost" visually
> than does "." .  However, the "dotted" names are in common use; LMI Forth
> uses those names, and LMI Forth is a very successful system.
> 
> Another good set of names would be #IF #ELSE #ENDIF , just like C uses.
> I don't subscribe to the philosophy that Forth always has to do things
> differently from C on general priciples, and the C names are certainly
> widely known in the programming community at large.

According to the docs I have on Upper Deck Systems Forth, they use the
#if ... #endif nestable forms.  Do they have anyone on the TC (or did they?)?

> However, all this is pretty much moot; the concrete proposal says
> .IF .ELSE .THEN , and I doubt that there will be another opportunity
> to tune the names before Basis goes to dpANS.  That is fine with me;
> the function is much more important than the names, and I think the
> proposed names are good enough for all practical purposes.

I was almost ready to agree with you about "more important than the names."
I think that a consistency in naming conventions is at the same level of
importance as the function(s) being added.  As someone else already pointed
out, the tradition of a . (dot) prefix meaning "print" is being violated.
I'm curious to know if "common use" is isomorphic with "LMI does it" in this
case or if there really are other users.  (As I pointed out, Upper Deck Systems
does it differently).

-Doug
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