Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!a684
From: Nick_Janow@mindlink.bc.ca (Nick Janow)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: 5 Lbs 3 Oz
Message-ID: <5593@mindlink.bc.ca>
Date: 22 Apr 91 21:22:21 GMT
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Lines: 28

ir230@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (john wavrik) writes:

> The attention of the Forth community is being directed to the words: which
> are "in" and which are "out". Users are being lulled into assuming that if a
> word is "there" (in BASIS) that it has the familiar meaning. It is precisely
> this kind of assumption that leads users to overlook omissions and not see
> alterations.

That could be a problem, but the solution is to make clear that the standard's
words are not necessarily exactly the same as the ones that you have used in
xxxForth.  A simple "Warning: the semantics of ANSI Forth words may not be
identical to that in previous versions of Forth." printed on the first page (or
some other visible place) should be enough.  I don't see it as a problem of the
contents of the standard.


> The proposed ANSI-Forth is not a simple room addition. It is a new language
> that shares many words (but not meanings) with the language we now use.

I see it as a new version of Forth that will be offered by several commercial
software companies and shareware/freeware writers.  How well it does will be
determined by the marketplace, the same way F83, MacForth, etc were judged.  I
expect that the benefits of ANSI Forth--mainly the portability issues--will win
it a lot of support.

Programmers who find the architecture-independent compromises of ANSI Forth too
restrictive probably have applications that are too machine-specific to be
portable anyways.