Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!npeer.de.kpn-eurorings.net!npeer-ng0.de.kpn-eurorings.net!feed.news.schlund.de!schlund.de!news.online.de!not-for-mail From: Bernd Paysan Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: PICK changed from 1-based to 0-based? Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 23:20:06 +0100 Organization: 1&1 Internet AG Lines: 59 Message-ID: References: <7xvby8f6md.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com> <_IWdne2ZbpNkmVzPnZ2dnUVZ_t6dnZ2d@supernews.com> <7xk3emu934.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com> <2013Dec30.170626@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <2013Dec30.185008@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <8-6dnVBiuJhdJFzPnZ2dnUVZ_h2dnZ2d@supernews.com> <2014Jan2.122156@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <52c594e4.795253800@news.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: p5dcd642c.dip0.t-ipconnect.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit X-Trace: online.de 1388701207 23200 93.205.100.44 (2 Jan 2014 22:20:07 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@einsundeins.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2014 22:20:07 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: KNode/4.11.3 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:27607 Stephen Pelc wrote: > On Thu, 02 Jan 2014 16:58:11 +0100, Bernd Paysan > wrote: > >>If you want your system to be ideosyncratic backward compatible by default >>(which MPE obviously wants to, for reasons I won't question: customer >>satisfaction and customer lock-in are worth it), then they should offer a >>compatibility layer that makes the system standard conformant. E.g. >>switching the decimal points to the standard ones, or loading the >>preferred floating point library. > > I don't know what triggered this rant, but Happy New Year to you too. > > We certainly try not to irritate clients. Backward compatibility may > not be important to people with small applications, but it is > really important to people with big applications. I don't want to irritate my "customers" either (even though they are non- paying customers), so I keep some things backwards compatible even if I consider that no longer a good idea. > I have fought the good fight to make floating point input usable > in applications as well as standard Forth source code. Similarly > I tried to make double number entry usable in application code. > In both cases we (MPE) can cope with internationalisation. > With some reluctance, a while back we switched the defaults to > be standards compliant. Indeed. Nearly 20 years after they became standard ;-). > As to the defaults floating point pack, the only people who > complain are you and Anton. You are both system implementors > yourselves. Ah, come on Stephen, you know what the feedback ratio is, it's not even an 80/20 rule. I said to you that you gave me the most valueable feedback for Minos, and I'm quite sure that was because you are a system implementor and you don't put up with idiocy I implemented, so you complained. So do we. Just listen to every complaint you get, and with every complaint you fix, you will improve the satisfaction of another 20 costumers who didn't dare to complain. bigForth didn't load the floating point library by default, either. The only complaint I got was from Anton. I fixed it, and I'm sure more people than Anton were happy with the result. That's how feedback works. "Nobody complained" is wrong once the first person complains, so it's not an argument. At least 10 years ago we had programmed Lego RCX bricks on a Forth Tagung, and we asked Martin Bitter how his students tolerated the bugs in the RCX Forth. He said "they don't know better". That's the reason why many people don't complain. -- Bernd Paysan "If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" http://bernd-paysan.de/