Re: modernization of FORTH, Age Results

Jerry Avins wrote:
A universal attribute perhaps; certainly not a universal grammar.

The attribute for sure is universal. A language consists of vocabulary and
grammar, or if you express it differently, you'd say words and rules how to
put words together. Both words and rules define the semantics of a
statement in any given language, if you omit either one, you just can't
express anything.

In so far, Forth has words and some rules, but the rules are simple and few.
Other languages have more complicated rules. That's how things are - the
book I used to learn Chinese contained about 50 chapters, most of them
featured how to translate a particular grammatical construct in German to
Chinese. It's a grammatical concept in German, but it usually fits within
the simple Chinese grammar, and is *not* a particular construct there. It
usually simply follows the more general rules, i.e. the subject verb object
rule. The good thing is that the modern German dialects have developed into
the same direction, and used remarkable similar constructs for things that
are grammatical in German (in Bavarian, one case completely vanished, only
two time forms are used regularly - and the way to express the rest is
homomorph to the way Chinese does).

The universal grammar of (most) programming languages is that statements are
executed sequentially, and that there are constructs like loops and
alternative branches, functions and subroutines. Forth does have all those
grammatical elements, and the statement is the word. Most other languages
have rules for possible statements, and differ between function calls and
primitive operations, Forth doesn't. But then, if you ask a Latin teacher
what constitutes "grammar" (in Latin), he probably tells you that a
language has gender, case, and tempus, and that words change depending on
gender, case, and tempus (remember the "Romanus eunt domus" scene in "Life
of Brian" ;-). Chinese has none of these features; i.e. "no grammar",
so "luomaren qu jia" is both a literal translation of what Brian had
written, and also grammatically perfectly ok (not ok in intention to insult
them: "qu si ba" (go to hell) is more appropriate).

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
.

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