Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!PENNDRLS.BITNET!DAVID
From: DAVID@PENNDRLS.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: FORTH and Functional Programming, and FORTH LINT
Message-ID: <8809021715.AA19311@jade.berkeley.edu>
Date: 2 Sep 88 17:06:03 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Forth Interest Group International List <FIGI-L%SCFVM.bitnet@jade.berkeley.edu>
Organization: The Internet
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Beat me to the punch.  I was going to post a quote from Backus on
a similar subject.  I'm sort of wandering around in the Functional
Programming literature right now.  Interesting questions, but I'd
like to see more work relating it to the *real* world of programming.
Anyone have any references to papers or whatnot dealing with
FORTH and functional programming?

Re: FORTH and type checking.  Has anyone done any work on an
analog of LINT for FORTH?  Such a beast ought to be writable in
such a way as to be extensible in close conjunction with extensions
to the FORTH compiler, and therefore lose none of the flexability
a pre-processor approach would lose.  Something along the lines of
giving the stack effect comments real meaning, perhaps.  Anyway, just a
thought, and not one I've devoted much brain power to.

By the way, to the poster who facetiously made the comment that the
compile time checking of proper nesting of BEGIN/WHILE etc. was
restricting him: yes, it is.  I remember an example somewhere of a
very useful compile time operation that could not be used if the
block structure words demanded strict closure.  I forget exactly how
it worked; I'll see if I can find it.

-- R. David Murray    (DAVID@PENNDRLS.BITNET, DAVID@PENNDRLS.UPENN.EDU)

P.S.: Fraser, what language *do* you like?  No, don't anwer that.  We'd
just start bashing *it*. :-)