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Groups > comp.lang.forth > #51015

Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth

Newsgroups comp.lang.forth
Date 2016-09-15 17:58 -0700
References <2016Sep15.161930@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>
Message-ID <409bece8-4986-4e54-bb98-2abb47247bb4@googlegroups.com> (permalink)
Subject Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth
From hughaguilar96@gmail.com

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On Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 10:24:49 AM UTC-7, Anton Ertl wrote:
> At EuroForth Andrew Read gave an impromptu talk where he suggested a
> next-standard effort that would not be shackled by
> backwards-compatibility with the current (Forth-83/94/2012) line of
> standards.
> 
> While there was not that much desire for such an effort in the
> audience, the talk got me thinking about what is essential in the
> current line of Forth standards and which features of a Forth system
> would require such a next-standard effort (if there are people that
> want to have a standard for that).

In this thread,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.forth/D0PmblPgthM/o6Ivh2RbAgAJ;context-place=forum/comp.lang.forth

I said this:

On Wednesday, May 4, 2016 at 5:03:16 PM UTC-7, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> I said earlier that I would be the "chief" and I would appoint the committee members (similar to how Elizabeth Rather appoints the committee members for Forth-200x). I'm not going to be like Leon Wagner though and tell everybody exactly what to believe, give them assignments, and write the specs for them (basically, treat them like code-monkeys). I just want to appoint the members so I can weed out people like Alex McDonald who claimed to "do standards for a living" (whatever the hell that means) and who knew very little about Forth. People can do whatever they want, so long as they adhere to the basic principles:
> 
> 1.) Minimalism. All that cruft in ANS-Forth will be discarded (for example: DO loops will go). I would expect the language to be less than half the size of ANS-Forth. As for the extension code-libraries, they will make the language bigger, but they are optional. They are containers (my list.4th and association.4th) or they are associated with a particular data-type (my string-stack.4th). The emphasis here should be on usefulness --- I was impressed by how Factor used "sequences" as a standard data-type, and this was my inspiration for list.4th --- also, almost all programs for desktop-computers are going to use strings, so having a standard library such as string-stack.4th is going to make the programs easy to read, rather than everybody doing something different in every program.
> 
> 2.) Behavior. The focus should be on standardizing behavior rather than implementation. One of the problems with ANS-Forth was that it standardized implementation. For example, ANS-Forth assumes that the >R data and the DO loops use the same stack, so they were standardizing on the PDP-11 implementation that had to do this because of a shortage of registers. Quite a lot of ANS-Forth assumes that the target processor is a PDP-11, apparently because that is the only processor that Elizabeth Rather is familiar with.
> 
> 3.) Quotations. My system with the fat-xt will be used to allow quotations to access the parent function's local variables. This is trivial to implement! This is the foundation to writing general-purpose data-structures --- I really see this as bring Forth into the 21st century --- make it comparable to the other desktop-computer language such as Lisp --- unlike Lisp though, we will not have garbage-collection or tagged data (we will not have Dynamic-OOP). The emphasis will still be on speed, and Dynamic-OOP is a dog, so leave that to the script kiddies.
> 
> 4.) Numerical. The 64-bit cell with the Fixed or Float data-type is fundamental to the language. I think this makes the language much simpler than ANS-Forth where integers and floats are distinct (so, this fits in with the minimalism idea). The "killer app" is CAM, but most machinists have experience primarily with using pocket calculators for figuring out gcode, and pocket calculators don't consider integers and floats to be distinct data-types. Also, it is important to define what the precision of the numbers is in the standard so the programmer knows what the results of numerical calculations are going to be and can expect the same results on every compliant compiler (so long as he sticks with either the Fixed or Float version, as they give different results from each other). I originally was only going to have the Fixed version, but Ilya Vasilyev convinced me to have a Float version also and to make them compatible with each other (except for a slight difference in the numeric results in some cases). This was here:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.lang.forth/ilya%7Csort:date/comp.lang.forth/R7K3FWXnyKE/0_LJ13ZfBQAJ
> 
> 5.) Cross-Compilation. The compiler should have all the necessary features for writing a cross-compiler. This is actually pretty easy --- it is amazing that ANS-Forth failed at such a simple task (I'm highly suspicious that ANS-Forth was purposely sabotaged to make cross-compilation difficult in order to prevent common users from writing a cross-compiler in competition with Forth Inc. and MPE who make most of their money selling vendor-specific cross-compilers) --- I know how to write a cross-compiler, so I will make sure that this is supported.
> 
> These are the 5 principles of Straight-Forth. Who disagrees with any of these principles? Which ones? Why?
> 
> Note that LFTforth is for micro-controllers and would have different principles that it is based on --- that is really Raimond's thing, not mine.

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Thread

Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-15 14:19 +0000
  Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-09-15 17:58 -0700
    Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth tabcomputing@gmail.com - 2016-09-24 18:48 -0700
      Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-09-24 21:47 -0700
        Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth tabcomputing@gmail.com - 2016-09-25 08:11 -0700
          Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-09-25 20:14 -0700
            Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-09-26 11:12 +0200
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2016-09-26 12:16 +0100
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-09-26 14:30 +0200
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Coos Haak <htrofhc@gmail.com> - 2016-09-26 15:10 +0200
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-09-26 16:07 +0200
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-26 13:43 +0000
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-09-26 16:36 +0200
        Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Rod Pemberton <NoHaveNotOne@zxdehrnyya.cam> - 2016-09-25 15:18 -0400
  Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anotherreepca@gmail.com - 2016-09-18 09:01 -0700
    Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2016-09-18 11:35 -0500
      Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth minforth@arcor.de - 2016-09-19 03:21 -0700
        Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-19 09:49 -0500
          Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth minforth@arcor.de - 2016-09-19 12:38 -0700
            Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-20 11:23 -0500
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth lawrencedo99@gmail.com - 2016-09-20 12:55 -0700
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-09-21 02:24 +0200
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-09-20 14:52 -0700
      Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth JUERGEN <epldfpga@aol.com> - 2016-09-19 10:12 -0700
        Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Cecil Bayona <cbayona@cbayona.com> - 2016-09-19 12:40 -0500
    Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2016-09-21 10:09 +0000
  Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-09-19 13:29 +0200
    Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth foxaudioresearch@gmail.com - 2016-09-19 07:16 -0700
    Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-19 17:10 +0000
  Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth humptydumpty <ouatubi@gmail.com> - 2016-09-20 22:43 -0700
    Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-21 12:39 +0000
      Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-09-22 11:40 -0700
        Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth humptydumpty <ouatubi@gmail.com> - 2016-09-23 09:28 -0700
      Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth humptydumpty <ouatubi@gmail.com> - 2016-09-23 09:19 -0700
  Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-09-23 20:11 -0700
    Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-24 10:55 +0000
      Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Matthias Trute <matthias.trute@gmail.com> - 2016-09-24 11:14 -0700
        Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-25 03:01 -0500
          Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Matthias Trute <matthias.trute@gmail.com> - 2016-09-25 02:21 -0700
            Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth lawrencedo99@gmail.com - 2016-09-25 14:01 -0700
            Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-09-25 15:04 -0700
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth lawrencedo99@gmail.com - 2016-09-25 17:39 -0700
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-09-25 17:56 -0700
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Mikael Nordman <oh2aun@gmail.com> - 2016-09-25 20:34 -0700
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-09-25 22:37 -0700
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-26 02:34 -0500
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-26 14:04 +0000
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-26 10:40 -0500
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-28 06:43 +0000
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-28 04:48 -0500
          Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-26 14:58 +0000
            Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-26 11:02 -0500
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-26 23:28 +0000
                Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-27 03:49 -0500
              Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth Alex <alex@rivadpm.com> - 2016-09-27 11:43 +0100
        Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-26 16:01 +0000
          Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2016-09-26 20:06 +0000
            Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-27 14:49 +0000
              Re: Standardization Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-27 11:20 -0500
              Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2016-09-28 12:07 +0000
                Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) Bernd Paysan <bernd@net2o.de> - 2016-09-29 02:07 +0000
                Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-09-28 19:40 -0700
                Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) Ilya Tarasov <ilya74.tarasov@gmail.com> - 2016-09-29 15:22 -0700
                Re: Standardization Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-09-29 04:12 -0500
                Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) stephen@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2016-09-29 10:15 +0000
                Re: Standardization (was: Essential properties of current standard Forth) Matthias Trute <matthias.trute@gmail.com> - 2016-09-29 10:38 -0700
      Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth trans <transfire@gmail.com> - 2016-09-26 18:04 -0700
        Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-27 13:37 +0000
  Re: Essential properties of current standard Forth jim.brakefield@ieee.org - 2016-09-28 13:54 -0700

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