Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Rod Pemberton" Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Forth without integer data stack. It is even better! Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 03:38:06 -0400 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Lines: 51 Message-ID: References: <2453d48c-1a5c-4d36-97a4-83bd63b0c43f@googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: n4wpt9zq8xR26Ttf9mo2BA.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed; delsp=yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Opera Mail/12.16 (Linux) X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:41392 On Tue, 18 Aug 2015 15:09:18 -0400, wrote: > On Sunday, August 16, 2015 at 2:13:09 AM UTC-7, Ilya V. Vasilyev wrote: >> May be with floats as main data type Forth would be >> as good for desktop as any other language. > > You still need to have quotations to be as > "good for desktop as any other language" Why? ... Many successful languages have broken or incomplete language features. Look at Forth. Look at C. Look at Pascal, COBOL, Lisp, Fortran, and C++ ... > (at least, modern Scheme/Lisp derived languages, although Forth > is already better than C that doesn't have quotations). If the feature is of little use, why does the quality of it's implementation matter? ... Spend your time on stuff that matters. > I'm already working on a Forth-like language that has quotations, > but now I'm thinking of including your idea about floats or > something similar. Wow, you're just like the ... well, one particular race and nationality ... which copies everything they see. >> Application, such as micro-controller, could not tell the difference, >> until it actually tries to use floating point. > > This is a good point, that I hadn't thought of --- what type > of data exactly is on the stack, can be implementation dependent > --- so long as all the integer functions work, then integer-only > code will port to any implementation whether the data is integer > or float (in the latter case, you get to have fractions). Are you really likely to do any floating point, Hugh? I've almost never used floating point in decades of programming in C ... It's about as useful as having a language support imaginary numbers or booleans, i.e., utterly useless. Do you intend to solve the Mandelbrot set? If not, use integers, forget the floating point. It's slow, difficult to use, non-portable, has numerous formats, etc. Rod Pemberton -- Scientists now say we'll experience a mini-ice in 2030. So, I guess we need more global warming today ...