Re: Hello, quick question

Op Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:01:23 -0500 schreef Gregory Weston:

In article <1aj9f4clxjixi.cagqp59vd3ff$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx>,
Coos Haak <chforth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Op Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:56:33 -0500 schreef Gregory Weston:

In article <fmmck-8C0FC1.13363705022009@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Fred McKenzie <fmmck@xxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <lnidvq9csn.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Keith Falconer <MarkAmbuhl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What's comp.lang.forth.mac about exactly? Is there a FAQ? Thanks!

Keith-

Thats a good question. I'm interested in Forth on the Macintosh, but
don't know much about it.

There certainly isn't much activity here. The last posting I'm aware of
was back in November. With such a low volume of traffic, many news
hosts will eventually drop it.

Fred

The follow-up made it to my server before the original post did, so I'll
take a stab at addressing both:

The group is about FORTH programming on/for Macs. If you're unfamiliar
with FORTH, it's a programming language that, IIRC, was originally
created as a way to write control systems for telescopes or something
like that. A fair amount of information at Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)>

For the follow-up: No, there really isn't a lot of activity. The
community of FORTH developers is relatively small and I'd be surprised
if it's not shrinking in absolute numbers. On the Mac, I'm really not
sure how much interest there is outside of the MOPS community. So for
jumping-off points and like-minded folks to talk to, it might make more
sense to start here:
<http://powermops.com/>

The name of this language, Forth, is not an acronym like BASIC.

That's true. But it comes from a system whose file system identifiers
were restricted to uppercase, and out of habit many FORTH users and
providers continued to write it that way even when the file system
restrictions were no longer widely relevant. The use of all caps is
stylistic, not indicative of a belief in any deeper meaning.

Compare with Fortran, which used to be officially "FORTRAN" - and still
is in the minds of many of its users - but was never "ForTran" even
though the name is a shortening of "Formula Translation"

From http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-lang/forth-faq/part1/

3.2. Where does the name Forth come from?

The name FORTH was intended to suggest software for the
fourth (next) generation computers, which Moore saw as being
characterized by distributed small computers. The operating
system he used at the time restricted file names to five
characters, so the "U" was discarded. FORTH was spelled in
upper case until the late 70's because of the prevalence of
of upper-case-only I/O devices. The name "Forth" was gener-
ally adopted when lower case became widely available,
because the word was not an acronym.

It's been nearly 30 years now ;-)
--
Coos

CHForth, 16 bit DOS applications
http://home.hccnet.nl/j.j.haak/forth.html

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A Weird Beginning of a path
    ... David Candy hunted and pecked: ... the MS-DOS FAT file system ... supports 8 characters for the base file name and 3 characters for the ... Both file systems use the backslash character to separate directory ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: To "TAB" or not to "TAB"
    ... >> I meant inert in terms of how Fortran treats it. ... > The standard establishes 2 classificatins of representable characters ... negative I want etc. in character strings now in every compiler I'm ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Do any java.io classes support inserting text into a file?
    ... I was thinking that the file was stored as an array of characters rather than a piece of paper though, and there might be some way to move the pointer that points to the first element of the array back by the number of characters I have to prepend. ... Let us say that your file system uses disk blocks of 4096 bytes. ... But if it is not a multipla of 40956, ... If there was an application which manipulated large files, needed to make random, variable-sized insertions into them, and needed to run fast, then such a filesystem would be useful. ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)
  • Re: Converting fixed-to-free format
    ... Fortran fixed format source lines are defined to be ... "A line is a string of 72 characters." ... Question for Robin: ... with devices that have line lengths other than 72. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: keyword capitalization -- current practice
    ... outside the scope of the standard. ... more) different characters to be functionally the same. ... I once used a computer that used the ASCII character set, ... But the fortran compiler on that machine only recognized the subset ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
Loading