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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: What's WRONG with Forth?
Message-ID: <2780.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 17 May 91 11:36:50 GMT
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 39

Category 2,  Topic 9
Message 100       Wed May 15, 1991
B.RODRIGUEZ2 [Brad]          at 21:28 EDT
 
To Bob Cavanaugh:

I don't use C professionally, and the only PC C compiler I've used is Turbo C
(basic package), so it's hard for me to judge.  I also have difficulty
distinguishing deficiencies in the language from deficiencies in one
particular implementation.  Certainly I consider Turbo C polished and well
integrated.  On the other hand, I've run into memory limits with some rather
small C programs, so I probably wouldn't count on Turbo C for a large project.

I assume your question was "why are professional _Forths_ 10X or more this
price?"   Easy.  There's 100X or more customers for C. Software has a big
"fixed cost" and a small "variable cost," so economies of scale really apply.

To Dennis Ruffer:

1. For the command line parser, all we need is the text interpreter, but for
field service, we really want to have the compiler as well. Why are colon and
CREATE so sacred?

2. My clients do the maintenance.  A shell and a good cookbook would probably
do wonders.

3. If by "nucleus" you mean the source code for the underlying Forth system,
no, we don't need it.  The MPE compiler comes with complete source for the
target compiler, which is loaded on top of a canned nucleus.  So, we can
modify the target compiler -- and we've had occasion to.

Hope this helps.

- Brad
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