Re: doing exercises for starting forth, kinda discouraging, some are easy and some seem text not prepare me for....

From	Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.forth
Subject	Re: doing exercises for starting forth, kinda discouraging, some are easy and some seem text not prepare me for....
Date	2012-07-10 01:22 -0700
Organization	http://groups.google.com
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References	(9 earlier) <605c1d4c-68b0-4ade-93b4-3f38a435f299@h20g2000yqe.googlegroups.com> <slrnjve4u0.kjh.jenglish@eurydice.office.flightlab.com> <8bd2001c-0738-48ee-8c4c-3641f932b4ac@re8g2000pbc.googlegroups.com> <d342785f-f356-48a8-a14a-7819b7314c94@w6g2000yqg.googlegroups.com> <8bd01b66-c145-46a2-8f34-857b78c5a3ee@x6g2000pbh.googlegroups.com>

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On Jul 10, 7:58 am, Hugh Aguilar <hughaguila...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Jul 7, 11:59 pm, Howerd <howe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > I am curious to know three things :
> > 3) Why do you think that the good folks of comp.lang.forth lack
> > intelligence?
>
> Because they failed to design a standard for Forth that made any
> sense, and the Forth language failed as a result.
>
> Anton Ertl is like Dora the Explorer with Gforth. He has a screwball C
> implementation, and it is just getting more and more complicated. He
> doesn't know how words like semicolon and IF and such can be written
> in Forth, so he writes them in C and then says that they don't have xt
> values. Then he bodges the ANS-Forth standard so that it states that
> these words aren't required to have xt values. The standard is
> following Gforth, rather than the other way around. And he has various
> words with dual xt values --- which xt gets returned by FIND depends
> upon the context that FIND is called in. !!! Remember what I said
> earlier about my standard procedure being to think about a subject
> inside of my head and find the truth? This is what Anton Ertl never
> did. This is why I compare him to Dora the Explorer --- rather than
> develop a plan (and rewrite Gforth in assembly-language), he just
> keeps muddling around with his screwball C implementation. If he
> discovers a weird hack that keeps the system running, then he bodges
> the standard to make it legal, and nevermind if it makes no sense to
> observers like me --- the "good folks" of comp.lang.forth will just
> say that my software "sucks" and that will settle the issue.
>
> I have given up on ANS-Forth and Forth-200x. I am developing my own
> standard, which I will call Straight Forth. Every word has exactly one
> xt value. There are TARG, HOST and SYSTEM modes. A lot of the words
> are represented in all three modes. You use [T'] [H'] or [S'] to get
> the appropriate xt value. Also, if you don't know where an xt value
> came from, you can test it to find out. The xt values are
> "reflective" (to use the computer-sciency term) --- you can find out
> lots of things about a word given its xt value. The implementation of
> a cross-compiler is somewhat complicated internally, but it can be
> described very simply --- the standards document will be much simpler
> than the ANS-Forth document (and I won't use the word "may" as a
> crutch the way that the ANS-Forth document does).
>
> P.S. for Mark Willis: This is my first-ever use of the Englishism
> "bodge" --- did I use it correctly?

Yeah, it was spot on. I noticed it straight away, and it raised a
smile.

When you bodge something, you're 'putting a sticking plaster' over the
problem and walking away. It's fixed as far as you're concerned. Back
in the 70's here in the UK, our fathers would spend all weekend
bodging their British Leyland cars (utter peices of rusting shit,
produced under massivly unionised soviet style work ethics, on
perpetually bodged production lines, bodged by communists from the
Black Country (an area in the Midlands in England) that would strike
at the drop of a hat) with PolyFiller (Bondo in the USA I think it's
called). I have a full technicolor recall of the crack of my dad's
arse (butt), because the poor sod was bent over the bonnet (hood) of
his Austin 1300 every weekend, in the hope that it could be bodged for
another week. His toolbox was permanently stored in the boot (trunk)
of the car.

"Dad, can we go and play football now?"
"Soon son. Pass me that feeler gauge."

Thank God the Japanese invaded with their Datsuns.

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