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From: magik@chinet.UUCP (Ben Liberman)
Newsgroups: net.lang.forth
Subject: What's so good about FORTH?
Message-ID: <369@chinet.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Jun-86 17:12:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: chinet.369
Posted: Fri Jun 13 17:12:16 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Jun-86 16:38:02 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: chinet, Public Access UN*X, Chicago, IL
Lines: 52

The following was recently posted to net.arch
It seems that someone here could probably give him a better reply than the stuff
that is showing up in net.arch

	Ben Liberman

ihnp4!chinet!magik   or   ihnp4!homebru!magik
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: What's so good about FORTH?
Message-ID: <2199@peora.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jun 86 12:49:12 GMT
References: <201@pyuxv.UUCP> <3700003@uiucdcsp> <132@vaxb.calgary.UUCP> <1193@terak.UUCP> <455@cad.BERKELEY.EDU> <333@anasazi.UUCP>
Organization: Concurrent Computer Corporation, Orlando, Fl
Lines: 34
Keywords: FORTH

> When coding in Forth, you do all the coding in the high level language
> (and can interactively test the code).

I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with net.arch, but aside from
that, this raises an issue that's been puzzling me for several years.
In fact, I've even written a couple of postings in the past on it, then
usually cancelled them because the question was so ambiguous.

The question is, *why* is Forth described in such glowing terms, when the
attributes that are listed as the reason for such a description are not
particularly unusual?  In my (obviously personal) opinion, Forth seems
to be a language best suited to very small machines, e.g., programmable
calculators, where it indeed does give benefits over things like BASIC,
but that if you have a machine sufficiently large (in terms of fast
primary and secondary storage to support a compiler) and with a reasonable
architecture to support a HLL, without an excessive "semantic gap" between
the HLL and the machine, then one of the more conventional HLLs
seems more expressive and "powerful".

I have wondered whether there might be some demographic property of 
FORTH enthusiasts that's not immediately apparent -- e.g., maybe they
run machines without any random-access mass storage device, or with
very small memory; or maybe they are used to programming in BASIC and
an assembler language, and then discover FORTH -- but since these
attributes *aren't* things apparent, it's hard to know.

Thus my question... what is the real *advantage* of FORTH?  If you answer,
please avoid terms like "incremental compilation" and "threaded" unless
you actually explain an implementation to show why these concepts are
really beneficial, and what architectural properties of a machine they would
fit well with.
-- 
E. Roskos
"Winds allow other skylines to hold you."