Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SUN.COM!wmb From: wmb@SUN.COM Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Declining Forth popularity. Message-ID: <8912160503.AA25980@jade.berkeley.edu> Date: 16 Dec 89 01:39:05 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Forth Interest Group International List Organization: The Internet Lines: 39 > Surely the Forthers of the world could agree on some minimal set of wordsets > to implement? It's kind of like what I understand the ANSI committee is > trying to do with the language Agreement is a very difficult thing to achieve. For example, believing that memory allocation is important, I convened a working group at this summer's Rochester Forth Conference. The group consisted of most of the Forth vendors at the conference, as well as any other interested parties. We worked out the specification for a memory allocation wordset which was acceptable to all concerned. I presented the proposal at the October ANSI Forth meeting. It was defeated. There were violent disagreements in all directions, many of them mutually incompatible. One person rejected it because it could not allocate memory in different segments on the PC (which would be useless, because the ANSI standard has absolutely no words for accessing such memory even if it could be allocated). I was so frustrated by the experience that I had to get up and leave the room. Frankly, I wonder why I bother. The process of obtaining agreement on any such issue is a political problem, from start to finish. Politics is hard. In this arena, the payoff is entirely unclear. Programming is a lot more fun. On the brighter side, the ANSI committee has made some progress; there is a file access wordset. It's woefully incomplete, but it's a lot better than nothing. The floating point wordset is pretty good. I have little hope that the Forth community will come to any sort of agreement whatsoever on issues of graphics and windowing, considering that the computer industry at large is involved in a massive battle over which window system becomes the standard (Microsoft can't even decide between it's own two window systems, let alone the raging battles between the various Unix camps). My fear is that the ANSI Forth standard is "too little, too late". Mitch