Re: advantages of forth over other languages

Andreas Klimas <klimas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

John Doty wrote:
John Passaniti wrote:

Three of the most common features of Forth that people point
to when comparing against C is interactivity,

Very important in the past. But these days the *systems* are
interactive and I can get around the edit/build/test loop in a
few seconds even with a compile/link language. Faster than I
can think ;-)

and it is still clumsy.
you need a C-File, probable H-File, edit Makefile, take
care of dependency have to link a lot of libraries every
time only to get a small (test) function running.

If you have pretty widespread BSD system (NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD),
you only need to type "make this", and it will compile "this.c",
link it, and bring you executable without even asking you to
write Makefile. If you want more complex things, you have plenty
of examples in your /usr/src, and once you learn it, you get plenty
of libraries to suffice your needs, which you can't say about Forth.

and the ability to do run-time evaluation.

I assume you mean compile-time: I know of few languages that
prevent run-time evaluation!

But here, C folks again use the *systems* that support C:
generate C code with a script or another C program during the
build. You can have whatever build-time computation you want
that way.

more complex dependency for makefile. C code generators tend to
be more complex as those little building words in Forth.

Oh really? This so trivial, that you even can't imagine.
For instance, this is Makefile for expr(1) tool from NetBSD
empty lines removed:

# $NetBSD: Makefile,v 1.14 2000/09/19 17:20:00 jdolecek Exp $
PROG= expr
SRCS= expr.y
..include <bsd.prog.mk>

Really complex, isn't it?


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