Re: The Promise of Forth

Bruce McFarling <agila61@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Mar 26, 11:31 pm, "Mark W. Humphries" <m...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I find it ironic that you continuously criticize Forth's syntax when
one of Forth's unique features is that it imposes no restrictions on
syntax and it allows one the complete freedom to extend and morph the
language to suit one's needs and biases. With Forth you can have it
your way, so why complain? Just do it.

What I find ironic is that the supposed flaw in Forth is that it
does not conform to the way that a particular school of linguistics
views reasoning about problems ... and obviously an approach within
linguistics will have a bias toward an inflated view of the
importance of those things studied in linguistics ...

... and yet the test case is how well Forth with a very limited
set of extensions for arrays and structures reveals the structure
of a mathematical algorithm.

There is nothing that is in any way "natural" about infix algebra,
equations, or indeed most of the core syntax and grammatical rules
that have been found to be effective for developing and expressing
mathematical algorithm's. It is a very artificial language, and
requires quite a bit of effort to teach to those who were not
among the minority of secondary school students for whom it
"came naturally".

I'm pretty fine with Lisp and other prefix notations.

So, if what is desired is a Forth in which algorithms can be
written as clearly as if they were psuedocode, then defined
four distinct possible notations, identify the VM for each,
implement them in Forth, compose ten randomly selected
algorithms in each of the four, including testing for validity,
and based on the experience settle on a notation, and that's
done.

Why do you place all this on domain experts? You are Forth experts,
do it _yorselves_ to prove Forth is really good enough for _anything_,
that Forth is not a pile of ***, as it is. Even embedded system
experts sent it to trash can.


--
BECHA...
CKOPO CE3OH...
.

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