Re: The Promise of Forth

Bernd Paysan wrote:
John Doty wrote:
You need something like StrongForth as a foundation to do it right.

Yes, thought of that. That's one reason to get Stephan Becher to write a
StrongForth in ANS Forth, so you can add that on top of a normal Forth
system. Add infix on top of StrongForth, and you get what your users want.

Furthermore, Fortran goes far beyond formulas. Much Fortran code in my
archives is dominated by library calls. Again, the library issue.

No, not really. The libraries are Fortran libraries. No problem to call
Fortran libraries from bigFORTH.

People expect the whole job: be able to work in the language, be able to create and import libraries in the language, and be able to import libraries from outside the language.


Also, Fortran uses English imperative words like DO as prefix, as they are
used in English, while traditional Forth uses English words in ways that
do much more violence to the way the are used in English.

I find any programming language except perhaps COBOL is doing a lot of
violence to the English grammar. Some less, others more. I've never found
any value in that, programming languages are programming languages, natural
languages are natural languages, and as such not very good when programming
a computer. The idea that grammar is a "mental muscle" for programming is
alien for me, because I don't use grammar for my mental model of the
machine - the computer is not a grammatical object, it is a state machine.

You're a processor designer, so that's a natural viewpoint. But it is not an accessible viewpoint to many people.

Von Neumann and Cray programmed in octal, but couldn't get many to follow their lead.

Maybe other people may use grammar, I don't care much (the way I use my
brain to program computers is quite successful).



--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
--
History teaches that logical consistency is neither sufficient nor necessary to establish practical, real world truth. Those who attempt to use logic for that purpose are abusing it.
.

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