Re: What is Forth best at?

Howerd wrote:
I think its called having an opinion.

Lots of people have opinions. There are people who think the world is roughly 6000 years old. There are people who think the moon landing was a massive conspiracy/hoax. There are people who think the Holocaust never happened. There are people who think there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Yes, lots of people have opinions. And some of those opinions are stupid.

My opinion is, that the open source projects that I have looked at all
follow the pattern of the "hello world" example - they are
multiplatform, locale specific, use tar and gz, libraries, and version
control, all of which make it easier to compile the sources, and
harder for a human being ( me ) to understand them.

How dare communities form around standards and technologies that make sense to them and their work! The nerve of them! How dare programmers care about supporting different platforms and locales! I guess they didn't get the memo that real programmers only have to write code for English-speaking Americans who know that the radix point is a period, not a freakin' comma.

You also mentioned libraries and version control: Yes, those damn open source people will stop at nothing to obscure their code! No libraries! Don't they know about the wonderful productivity gains of reinventing wheels? And version control-- clearly no interesting problems are solved by that so-called "technology."

Of course to be consistent, I assume you will agree that since many if not most programmers are not familiar with Forth that you will immediately recast any public code you have into C. After all, it would make it easier for them to compile your sources, and easier for them (fellow human beings) to understand the code. Agree?

Maybe I'm criticising open source for failing to provide something it
was never designed to do.

I take a jet and land in Brazil. I walk into a restaurant where they only speak Portuguese and waiter hands me a menu. It's also in Portuguese and I can't read it. I ask the waiter to bring me a cheeseburger and fries. He replies in broken English that it's a vegetarian restaurant.

Clearly, the restaurant is awful. It was hard to understand anything because they use English, and they didn't even have what I wanted. But not only is this restaurant awful, I'd say all restaurants in Brazil are awful.

Sound familiar?

Yes - comp.lang.forth is a newsgroup where people chat about their
opinions.

Yes, and it's also a newsgroup where we all *evaluate* those opinions. You don't seem to like that part. You apparently want to be respected for having an opinion, but not for the quality of that opinion.

This is not a court of law where I have to prove beyond all reasonable
doubt that my opinion is absolute fact.

False premise. Absolute fact is not the standard here. Logically defending your statements when you are questioned on them is.

I've looked at some open source, and its not very good for what I
expected it to be used for. My bad.

Now you're downgrading your opinion. This started with your statement that open source (quote) "relies on the principle that programming is
complicated" (unquote).

Ogg Vorbis is a valient effort to stop corporate control of software
distribution.
No way would I call that junk. The code is perfectly respectable C
code, and documents many key functions.
My complaint is the difficulty of getting to the code through the
"open source" format.

Flawed argument. If Ogg Vorbis was distributed privately, the quality of the code wouldn't magically change. Your beef is with the quality of the documentation of Ogg Vorbis. How you morph that into some grandiose indictment of open source is not demonstrated by anything you have written.

But hey, don't just stop there. Clearly, you can
make sweeping generalizations about all open source software.
Yes. Maybe I'm wrong. Surely everyone reading this must know to
question any and all opinions.

I certainly wish more people in comp.lang.forth would start openly questioning the opinions and prevailing assumptions that underscore most of the discussion here.

So because you're a logically consistent man, you would also fault
Charles Moore for his release of the ColorForth source code, since the
assembly-language listing is essentially uncommented, and the supporting
documentation doesn't cover how the kernel works.
No, because Chuck did not release colorForth as open source, just a
snapshot of his work for those who were interested.

The essential quality of open source is that the source code is available. Different open source projects make the source code available for different reasons. Charles Moore most certainly did release ColorForth as open source. To say otherwise suggests you're using a very private and very bizarre definition for "open source."

Surely, he should
explain what each function does to help people understand his work, right?
That would be nice. But several people are working on this. Its called
team work.

Same for the Ogg Vorbis documentation? So incomplete documentation being filled by a community of volunteers is a good thing when it's ColorForth, but it's a bad thing when it's Ogg Vorbis. Interesting.

No doubt Chuck has got more urgent projects to spend his time on.

Not the issue.

Programmers tend to want to hide their expertise? Where is the evidence
for this?
I have anecdotal evidence.

Wow, that's compelling.

Last night I found the file codepage.c ( and friends ), and also some
documentation online, so I now know that Ogg is the wrapper and Vorbis
is the codec. And I've got the source code...

Seems relatively inefficient for you to look through code to discover that when that fact is documented on their web site.

The data is 16 bit 22kHz wav format generaic audio. I need it to be
compressed to a ~48kbit/s stream, using ~512 byte buffers.

"wav format" can mean one of several things, but I'll assume you mean PCM audio, probably signed integer format. You don't say if it's stereo, so I'll assume mono. You also don't specify what the audio is, which is important when choosing a codec (is it speech, music, a mixture). One would also want to know other details like if this needs to operate in real-time or if it is processing offline. And if it is real-time, what kind of processor and memory bandwidth do you have.

Then decompressed back again.
I think the MDCT algorithm might be useful here...

MDCT (or variations on it) are part of many audio compression standards and yes, it's obviously useful in that context. The question is if the specific attributes of MDCT (such as using overlapping buffers) makes sense to your application.
.

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