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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Extensibility (Re: RRe: What's so good about FORTH?
Message-ID: <2295@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 7-Jul-86 21:27:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.2295
Posted: Mon Jul  7 21:27:58 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Jul-86 05:24:30 EDT
References: <770@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: University of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Sci.
Lines: 23

Wayne A. Christopher writes:
>Perhaps this discussion is bothering some people, but I have another
>question about forth for the gurus on the subject -- the major
>advantage of C (as I see it) over Fortran, etc is the possibility of
>defining structures and abstract types.  Does forth have anything
>comparable, or are there any forth paradigms that make this easy?  Also,
>what sort of position does forth take in the spectrum with functional
>programming on one end and object-oriented programming on the other?
>It seems to me that (like C) forth doesn't really try to deal with this
>problem...

Forth offers absolutely no protection for the user as far as data typing is
concerned, so in that respect you don't get a lot of the benefits of
abstract types.  It does, however, support a really hierarchical structure
of operators into which operators for different data types fit nicely.  A
disciplined programmer can therefore reap the organizational advantages of
abstract types from the language.

I have a question: has anyone ever built a compiling 'compile' verb?  It
seems to me that it would be useful to set up some new Forth words when
compiling so that they produce new subroutines rather than threaded code.

C. Wingate