Re: Forth Frustrations

Duke Normandin wrote:
....
Is FIG-Forth _still_ closer to the original "spirit" and "intent" of the
Moore's creation? BTW, Forth 83 / 94 -- were these primarily commercial
Forth initiatives - or visa versa?

Fig-Forth was derived from FORTH, Inc.'s first microprocessor Forth, called microFORTH, in the late 70's, primarily aimed at the hobbyist market. The people who did most of the work were new to Forth and didn't understand a lot of things. Their main goal was to make a system easy to bring up on a variety of platforms (by typing in the assembly language for the processor of choice), and so optimized portability at the expense of efficiency. Chuck wrote Forth in Forth (metacompiling for new platforms) and made massive efforts to optimize efficiency on each. He thought FigForth was terrible, although he mellowed toward some of the later incarnations.

Forth83 and Forth94 were developed by a combination of hobbyist developers and users, commercial vendors, and users of the commercial systems. The big difference is that Forth83 was developed in only two 3-day meetings, 6 months apart, with somewhat differing membership, informal rules, and no official sanctioning body such as ANSI. As a result, many decisions were taken with relatively little thought. Some actions in the second meeting reversed decisions made in the first. Although a lot of people adopted Forth83, because there was a wide demand for standardization, there were a lot of bad feelings over it.

The ANSI process began in 1986, under the same formal rules governing all other ANSI language standards. The developers met 4 times a year, a total of 16 meeting days/year, in various parts of the country encouraging local Forthers to attend and voice their opinions. Drafts were published for public comment, and all comments were responded to. There were 4 drafts published for public review, and the standard was adopted in 1994 only after there were no more substantive changes resulting from the last review period. The list of members of the committee is published in the document. It's a large and diverse bunch. It's fair to say no one is 100% in agreement with everything in ANS Forth, because compromises are necessary to reach a consensus. But a consensus was reached on every issue, and everyone I know who has been seriously using it thinks it's pretty good (that includes me). The dissenters are roughly evenly divided between folks who think it's way too large and complicated and those who think it's way too limited and incomplete. Those of us who are using Forth in commercial projects (many of which are for large companies) know that the very existence of an ANSI Standard has facilitated its acceptance in these organizations.

Cheers,
Elizabeth

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Elizabeth D. Rather (US & Canada) 800-55-FORTH
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