Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SUN.COM!wmb
From: wmb@SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Declining Forth popularity.
Message-ID: <8912190115.AA29047@jade.berkeley.edu>
Date: 18 Dec 89 21:22:20 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Forth Interest Group International List <FIGI-L%SCFVM.bitnet@jade.berkeley.edu>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 42

> Dave Binette writes:
> I would like to see..
> Standard ascii text files for source (LMI has this)

This is becoming pretty widespread.  LMI, JForth, MultiForth, Forthmacs,
Sun Forth, F-PC, Mach II, HS Forth, all use or support text files.
Apologies to implementations I have forgotten; pretty much everybody is
doing it.  The ANSI standard will encompass it too (I have been assigned
the task of writing "strawman" proposals to specify the precise semantics
of text file interpretation).


> A window management module.

It would be extremely difficult to come to agreement in this area,
consdering the many combattants in the "window system/toolkit war"
(Macintosh, Presentation Manager, MS Windows, X11, NeWS, Motif, New Wave,
Open Look, Display Postscript).  Whatever you pick, 70% of the people
are going to disagree violently.


> Memory management routines.

I proposed a set of memory management routines, semantically similar to
malloc() and free(), at the last ANSI meeting.  Alas, the proposal did
not pass.  A majority voted for it, but there were enough "nays" to prevent
the "overwhelming consensus" necessary for passing an ANSI Forth proposal.

In my opinion, the reasons given by the "naysayers" were bogus:
1) A couple of people think it is unnecessary because they personally
   do not need it (those people only use systems for which Forth
   owns the entire address space of the machine).

2) One person did not like it because it did not solve all his problems
   with DOS (the proposal intentionally does not address the problem of
   allocating memory in "nonlocal" segments, because ANSI Forth currently
   has no way to access such memory even if it can be allocated).

As a followup to this message, I will post my proposed memory allocation
wordset, along with an implementation.

Mitch