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From: pmy@vivaldi.acc.virginia.edu (Pete Yadlowsky)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Forth Pre-Compier
Message-ID: <535@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: 31 Aug 88 23:24:02 GMT
References: <8808121826.AA23206@jade.berkeley.edu> <1575@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <6882@well.UUCP> <1581@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <4057@juniper.uucp> <472@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> <1593@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Sender: news@hudson.acc.virginia.edu
Reply-To: pmy@vivaldi.acc.Virginia.EDU (Pete Yadlowsky)
Organization: University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Lines: 51

In article <1593@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> orr%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@ucl.nss.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) writes:

>Need I say that you could
>have the best of both worlds if you wrote a preprocessor that RPNed your
>arithmetic and control structures? At the same time you could add all the
>other nice things - structures, type checking, at least optional parameter
>lists, my nice implicit parameter passing stuff etc,etc,etc.

Baggage, baggage and more baggage. Type checking?! *gag* I don't want
some uppity compiler protecting me from myself and telling me how I
may and may not use my computer. That stuff's fine for beginners, but
when it's time to cut loose and actually put the machine to work...
Incidentally, some Forths (JForth, for the Amiga, for instance) do provide
C-like struct syntax. I only use this, though, to facilitate system calls,
as the Amiga is very C-oriented.

Forth is, more than anything else, a language used to implement languages...
a meta-language. No skilled Forth programmer writes applications in raw
Forth. S/he uses it to build a custom language that suits the application;
that is, in fact, the application itself. If that means postfix arithmetic,
fine, throw it in there. If it requires some sort of data structure, create
it. But why should the system and the programmer have to lug around *all*
of this "nice" traditional stuff when it is unnecessary and inappropriate?

I think most of your complaints about Forth are aimed at its bare-metal
bottom level. But, as I've said, the seasoned Forth programmer gets
away from this as quickly as possible by building ever higher levels
of abstraction and developing conceptually useful vocabularies. With
traditional compilers, however, the programmer is stuck with the
compiler's single vocabulary/syntax, so it had better be rich and
sufficiently complex. You seem to be regarding Forth, through
tradition-colored glasses, as yet another language with fixed vocabulary
and syntax. In skilled hands, it is not. If it was, it would indeed be
as objectionable as you say.

Somehow I think this has all been said a hundred times already. Sorry
for any redundancy.

>Sorry if your getting bored hearing me saying the same thing over and over
>and over and over again, but really I've yet to here a serious objection
>to it [a set of traditional constructs].

Don't want it. Don't need it. Don't want to pay for it (with money, time,
memory, or undue complexity). Is this serious enough?



Peter M. Yadlowsky
Academic Computing Center
University of Virginia
pmy@vivaldi.acc.Virginia.EDU