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Re: Forth reinvention

From "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm>
Newsgroups comp.lang.forth
Subject Re: Forth reinvention
Date 2014-02-20 05:07 -0500
Organization Aioe.org NNTP Server
Message-ID <op.xbkrqu0h5zc71u@localhost> (permalink)
References <b5ec955a-146f-41ea-a227-22e4224cab49@googlegroups.com>

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On Thu, 20 Feb 2014 04:19:23 -0500, <dambere@web.de> wrote:

> With regard to the discussion in 'Forth in oblivion', I
> have specifically asked the question what properties a
> Forth successor should have ?
>
> I think important are the following aspects:
>
> - switch to infix notation:
> Personally I found RPN an elegant, mathematical notation both solving  
> inconsistencies of traditional infix notations and ease parsing.  
> However, in general people have an innate aversion to the adoption of  
> unorthodox concepts nor are people able to think in abstract terms of  
> implementation efficiency. For these psychological reasons, a RPN based  
> programming language can hardly interest a wider audience without  
> constraint, especially since most programmers these days are already  
> grown with quite different (and much more complex) languages compared to  
> Forth.

Good.

> - Automatic parallelization:
> The trend goes to multi core architectures. A programming language that  
> is relieving the programmer from the not inconsiderable task of  
> paralleling programs will necessarily be attractive.

Nice, but not necessary.  Single-threading is still useful, has
less overhead, and fewer environment specific requirements.

> - Lack of leadership:
> To my knowledge, there exist no central leadership with financial impact  
> to promote Forth by all means. This must change.

Not important.  "Too many cooks spoil the broth."  You need one
smart, visionary dictator to resurrect Forth anew.


In addition to eliminating RPN for infix, I would like to add the
following to the list:

-use of symbols for binary and logical operations like AND OR XOR
-name Forth words correctly for what they do
-eliminate the need for the user to maintain stack data
-use curly braces {} to delimit blocks


I know some people truly hate that last one, but it is critical.
It's so fundamental, it's even been added to Python now:

Python with Braces
http://www.pythonb.org/


Of course, once you eliminate infix from Forth, progress towards use
of symbols for logical, binary, math operations, begin to use curly
braces, and eliminate the work of the user keeping track of stack data,
someone is going to call it C warmed over ... which goes towards the
question of what *IS* Forth?  Once changed radically, is it still Forth?
Or, more critically, how can you resurrect Forth without recreating C,
or Ruby, or Perl, or Python, or some other existing language?


Rod Pemberton

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Thread

Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 01:19 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 05:07 -0500
    Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 14:56 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 16:16 -0500
        Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 23:25 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 20:42 -0500
            Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 12:41 +0000
  Re: Forth reinvention Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2014-02-20 11:18 +0100
    Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 02:36 -0800
      Re: Forth reinvention Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2014-02-20 17:35 +0100
        Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 11:34 -0800
          Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 09:53 -1000
          Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-20 12:23 -0800
            Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 14:00 -0800
              Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-20 14:23 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-22 02:21 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention AKK <akk@nospam.org> - 2014-02-22 12:02 +0100
              Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-21 04:38 -0600
          Re: Forth reinvention Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2014-02-20 12:35 -0800
            Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-20 13:38 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention m.a.m.hendrix@tue.nl - 2014-02-20 03:59 -0800
    Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 15:11 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention m.a.m.hendrix@tue.nl - 2014-02-20 07:41 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention Richard Owlett <rowlett@pcnetinc.com> - 2014-02-20 06:38 -0600
    Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 12:03 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention Julian Fondren <julian.fondren@gmail.com> - 2014-02-20 07:08 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 09:37 -1000
    Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 20:50 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 15:39 -1000
        Re: Forth reinvention albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-02-21 10:50 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention Paul E Bennett <Paul_E.Bennett@topmail.co.uk> - 2014-02-21 11:10 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 13:50 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-21 05:46 -0600
          Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 12:55 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-21 15:11 +0000
            Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-22 09:23 -0600
        Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 12:38 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-22 13:29 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-22 07:52 -1000
            Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-22 19:06 +0000
            Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-23 13:40 +0000
    Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 20:40 -0500
      Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 18:43 -1000
        Re: Forth reinvention Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2014-02-21 13:16 +0100
      Re: Forth reinvention stephenXXX@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2014-02-21 10:49 +0000
    Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-21 14:50 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 16:28 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-22 12:54 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-22 10:27 -0500
          Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-22 17:49 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-21 20:51 +0100
        Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-22 09:39 -0600
          Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-23 02:40 +0100
            Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-22 19:24 -0800
              Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-23 22:48 +0100
            Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-23 04:39 -0600
              Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-23 22:46 +0100
                Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-23 14:26 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-24 02:44 +0100
                Re: Forth reinvention Spam@ControlQ.com - 2014-03-03 12:43 -0500
                Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-03-03 10:06 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-24 03:59 -0600
  Re: Forth reinvention mike73900@gmail.com - 2014-03-03 14:04 -0800
    Re: Forth reinvention mhx@iae.nl - 2014-03-05 06:59 -0800
      Re: Forth reinvention Matthias Koch <matthias.koch@hot.uni-hannover.de> - 2014-03-05 16:33 +0100
      Re: Forth reinvention Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 09:08 -0800
        Re: Forth reinvention mhx@iae.nl - 2014-03-05 10:47 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention AKK <akk@nospam.org> - 2014-03-07 07:30 +0100
    Re: Forth reinvention Lars Brinkhoff <lars.spam@nocrew.org> - 2014-03-07 07:55 +0100
    Re: Forth reinvention albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-07 09:29 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention AKK <akk@nospam.org> - 2014-03-07 12:04 +0100
      Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnothavet.cqm> - 2014-03-07 17:03 -0500
        Re: Forth reinvention Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2014-03-08 05:31 -0800

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