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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Conditionals !
Message-ID: <2469.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 7 Mar 91 03:41:48 GMT
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 28


   To: GARY SMITH                    Refer#: 1387
 From: RAY DUNCAN                      Read: NO
 Subj: CONDITIONALS !                Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE
 Conf: FORTH (58)                 Read Type: GENERAL (+)

   >I'm curious to know if "common use" is isomorphic with "LMI Does It"

 LMI didn't have any part in the addition of .IF .ELSE .THEN to the
 BASIS; we haven't been part of X3J14 for some time.  I can't speak for
 whether these words are in "common use" or not, and I don't claim that
 they are.

 For our own part, we picked the ".IF" notation by analogy to some
 assemblers which use a dot to prefix things that are assembler
 directives rather than actually generating code.  It's true that this
 conflicts somewhat with the Forth naming convention of dot indicating
 that something will be printed.  I don't have any preference on this
 issue one way or the other.   I do fail to see how #IF is any more
 "Forth-like" than ".IF" since the only use I know of for # in Forth is
 to convert binary to ASCII.

 Ray Duncan, LMI
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