Re: Forth and Co - The Return of the Jedi

Jerry Avins wrote:
John Doty wrote:
Jerry Avins wrote:
� wrote:

...

I personally have trouble calling ANS Forth a Forth but others will
disagree; many take this very much at heart ;-).

That must be a political statement. It certainly can't be an objective judgment.

It's no more political and non-objective than what you just wrote.

Much of what I wrote in AForth and migrated to PolyForth runs with little or no adjustment on any ANS implementation. (I haven't tried running that legacy code on ColorForth. Do you suppose that would work also?)

But if Forth is a way of devising languages, then this sort of stability indicates that Standard Forth isn't Forth at all: it's a merely a stagnant language frozen in an immature state.

So PolyForth wasn't Forth?

It was a pair of languages based on Forth ideas. Forth isn't a language, it's a methodology. Moore called it "A New Way to Program a Computer", not a new language.


Certainly ColorForth shows that Chuck Moore does not appreciate stagnation!

One person's stagnation is another's consistency; both are useful. Being predictable is a large part of being reliable.

That's the reasoning behind the infamous Ariane V rocket failure. Don't revise the software, even to remove useless calculations, because the results might be unpredictable. But when the useless calculation threw an uncaught exception...

Simplicity is a large part of being reliable, so what is one to make of a Forth standard that *mandates* unnecessary complexity? Every Standard Forth system must implement *two* languages with different grammar, but confusingly overlapping vocabulary. So unnecessary. So inconsistent.

Fortran code from the 1960's, before Forth existed, still runs. Maybe you should consider Fortran for your next high reliability project. ;-)

Vacuum tubes have much more consistent parameters than transistors. Were vacuum tube computers more reliable than transistor computers?

--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
--
Specialization is for robots.
.

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