Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Cecil Bayona Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Gforth snapshot for Windows Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 11:29:07 -0500 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 20 Message-ID: References: <2016Sep30.182645@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <87idnZOJ44rF_m3KnZ2dnUU7-fPNnZ2d@supernews.com> <2016Oct4.111815@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <381ca8eb-71cb-4a02-9aa4-bbf408443ba5@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 16:28:48 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="3730f768aed6ea62f7ebff1ff5577eca"; logging-data="24826"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+exczfy72T/xQaeRmt9oKH" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.4.0 In-Reply-To: <381ca8eb-71cb-4a02-9aa4-bbf408443ba5@googlegroups.com> Cancel-Lock: sha1:1/yyA0ND09LLh7zSy21Avw2ZD/0= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:52049 On 10/19/2016 10:37 AM, jjmail9@gmail.com wrote: > OK. EDITOR and/or EDIT or LIST invoke the editor vocabulary so the editor words don't always interfere with other searches. That's the point of vocabularies. Today's philosophy seems to be that every word should be seen all the time, globally, and should be unique. But, unfortunately, this renders the use of said words difficult as commands, and harder to associate functionally. > I'm a native speaker of English. That carrys certain biases as to language. We reuse words to death. We swim in ambiguity and grasp at new and related words like straws in the sea, attempting to reach islands of specificity. Other languages, especially the heavily inflected ones, weave the straws into mats until there's something that floats. Niether approach seems particularly well suited to computing. Forth, on the other (uh, third) hand, recognizes the functional dynamics of word use and naming. Vocabularies can do work. Words can talk about and talk to other words. But really, I don't think forth was ever meant to handle huge numbers of concepts, like how to manage all forms of editing or threading on every possible machine. That's more of a data problem. > So the short answer to the question of why would one want any vocabulary continuously present, is, forth doesn't usually do that, with the possible exception of ROOT. > By using vocabularies one also helps the system to be more responsive since only a subset of the available words are searched for. I'm speaking of embedded system, on a PC the CPU is so fast that it doesn't make much difference. I used to use Pygmy and it it emphasized the use of vocabularies and it was quite handy, the assembler had it's own vocabulary so conditionals used the same words one was used to but since the assembler vocabulary was searched first the assembler version of "IF" was found first. Nowadays oForth, and 8th use vocabularies extensively and it makes things a little easier. -- Cecil - k5nwa