Re: Forth Frustrations

mhx@xxxxxx (Marcel Hendrix) writes:
If you write something interesting in your variant, a programmer will
rewrite the essence in standard Forth, and the community will *always*
use it in that form because it simply is less hassle and easier to use
(they don't need to know the intricacies of the largish volume of
unfamiliar Forth code that implements your on-top-of variant).

Well, he could frustrate such efforts by always publishing a new
version in his variant as soon as the rewriter publishes the standard
Forth version.

The only time this will not happen is when what you wrote is simply
impossible in standard Forth.

Really? I seem to remember a number of programs that were published
littered with iForthisms, and that nobody bothered to fix. Were they
all impossible to write in standard Forth? Certainly the things I
looked at looked trivial enough (non-standard comments and word
names etc.).

A possibility to get a following is to write a humongously large and complex
special application in your Forth variant. People will want to use your
code because a rewrite is too much work. We have such systems (Mops,
Win32Forth, Minos). Look what is happening with/to them and extrapolate
e.g. 5 years ...

Please elaborate.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
EuroForth 2007: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/euroforth2007/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Forth Frustrations
    ... rewrite the essence in standard Forth, ... of creating impossible to rewrite programs. ... I expect its efforts to go into gForth. ... Insulting Windows users is pointless; MicroSoft does it every day of ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: Forth Frustrations
    ... rewrite the essence in standard Forth, ... of creating impossible to rewrite programs. ... The Mac will have an Intel CPU from ... Then Minos will be dead because it is too closely tied to bigForth and X. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Rewriting and predictions (was: Forth Frustrations)
    ... rewrite the essence in standard Forth, ... I was not discussing iForth, and certainly not in the context ... of creating impossible to rewrite programs. ... developer base, the probability of it vanishing is higher. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: Rewriting and predictions
    ... version in his variant as soon as the rewriter publishes the standard ... then you claim others would rewrite it into standard Forth, ... SwiftForth are not free software, and they probably never will be. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: Rewriting and predictions
    ... All these versions were massive functional improvements and worth a rewrite, ... impossible in standard Forth. ... developer base, the probability of it vanishing is higher. ... are you going to do a MacOS X port of iForth? ...
    (comp.lang.forth)