Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!norsat!dbin
From: dbin@norsat.UUCP (Dave Binette)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Declining Forth popularity.
Keywords: Forth, changes, extensions, marketing
Message-ID: <175@norsat.UUCP>
Date: 18 Dec 89 18:29:30 GMT
References: <1989Dec14.013516.24694@tree.uucp> <7318@ficc.uu.net> <1989Dec16.012556.14632@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
Reply-To: dbin@norsat.UUCP (Dave Binette)
Organization: Norsat International Research Inc. Surrey, BC, CANADA
Lines: 43

Maintaining old Forth code after a 2 year absence really brought home the
ugliness of the 1K editing screens.

Elegant to implement possibly, but awful to use.

Peter Da Silvas comments about makeing a more "mainstream" forth rang
true for me.

I would like to see..
Standard ascii text files for source (LMI has this)
    Function tags (like ctags).
Btree support.
Postfix user data entry facilities.
A window management module.
Memory management routines.

All part of a standard distribution.

My recent involvment has not been in writing NEW Forth code
but rather converting existing applications to C.

Painfull as it is, when i revisit perfectly good working Forth code
and want to do a rewrite or convert to a larger >64k based implimentation
I realize that many hacks done to the kernel to provide a sufficient
base for real user application are just too fuzzy and require  many
hours of study to determine all the side effects.

Converting an existing application to a new implimentation of forth
is NOT a big win, w~rhen the alternative is a rewrite in C especially
when the person paying the bill expects significant enhancements that
are much easier to provide in C and the plethora of PD packages available
for windowing etc.

Forths miserly approach to memory usage (a good thing) really bucks the
horrible trend that Microsloth embraces of using more resources than are
usually available, still Forths approach to memory is very limiting.

I like malloc() and its children.

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