Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!willett!dwp
From: dwp@willett.UUCP (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: postfixness
Message-ID: <448.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
Date: 12 Feb 90 00:30:17 GMT
References: <9002082200.AA26319@jade.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Latest link in the ForthNet chain.  (Pgh, PA)
Lines: 29

In article <9002082200.AA26319@jade.berkeley.edu> wmb@ENG.SUN.COM writes:
> Paul Bartholdi describes some alternative syntax for Forth "look-ahead" words:
> 2.  {{ <some code> }} <end index> <first index> ITERATE
>  Advantage: With a scheme like this, it is possible to have one and
>   only one look-ahead word, instead of the jumble of them
>   that Forth has now.
...
>  That way, there remains one and only one way to create a "closure"

Yes!  Isn't this kind of simplicity in the 'spirit' of Forth?

> Many of the hotly-debated topics at ANSI Forth meetings arise from
> places where Forth is not purely postfix.  For example, "state-smartness"
> and all its implications comes from non-postfix words.
...
> In contrast, Forth has many more syntactic constructs; essentially every
> immediate word has syntactic implications, plus every defining word and
> every word which calls WORD .

I must disagree here.  State-smartness and lookahead are separable issues.
I don't want to say "One shouldn't be *able* to write things like
WORD", but rather I want to ask "Wouldn't forth be cleaner if the core
language was pure-postfix and didn't *do* anything like that?"

		-Doug

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