NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/comp/lang/forth/2852

Internet Message Format | 1992-07-25 | 3.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!mucs!m1!bevan
From: [e-mail] (Stephen J Bevan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Down with free Forth systems.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 24 Jul 92 18:42:20 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
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Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester
Lines: 73
In-reply-to: [e-mail]'s message of 22 Jul 92 23:39:56 GMT

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Chuck Eaker) writes:
   I think it is worthwhile to distinguish between systems that are free
   (or inexpensive) and systems that are professionally developed.

Ok, but I don't really follow your distinctions ...


   C and Pascal were both of these.
   Both C and Pascal were both developed by teams of professionals whose
   jobs were to create such things.

N. Wirth developed Pascal, and with all due respect to him, I don't
think you'll find many people who thought much of his first
implementation.  As to C, it was cobled together as an when new
features were required in hacking UNIX.  Again with all due respect to
D. Ritchie ... etc. who worked on the first compilers, I think they
were more interested in what mapped easily to their hardward (various
PDPs) rather than _designing_ a language per se.


   A large number of Forth systems are free ...
   ... and I know of no other language for which popular implementations
   are free and were developed by people who were paid nothing to do it.

It depends on what you mean by develop.  I can name at least 5 free
Scheme implementations, a couple of CommonLisp ones, one EuLisp one, 3
Haskell ones (4 if you include Gofer), 2 ML ones.  If you think the
above aren't "real world" languages, then how about GNU C/C++?


   The moral of all of this is that I believe the following:
   Every "successful" language was professionally developed
   and is commercially supported. Furthermore, the commercial
   support comes from at least one big player who is going to be maintaining
   the language and holding hands over the long haul.
   (By "successful", I mean something which is used by lots of people,
   a high percentage of which are trying to learn something or make money.)

Even though I dislike the language, I think Perl is a counter example.
Larry Wall wrote it, gave it away free, and there are now a _lot_ of
users out there.  Vendors are even starting to ship it with their
products e.g. Convex and I wouldn't be suprised if Sun started
shipping it soon.

To a lesser extent you could also argue that languages like XLisp,
XScheme, TCL, Python are counter examples, though they haven't
attracted as much attention as Perl.


   Try this. Develop Forth++ which will operate in a Unix environment.
   Define Forth++ words which take the name of a (preferably C++) library
   (such as some of the X libraries) and links the library into the Forth++
   environment so that a user can interactively list the classes, functions,
   etc. provided by the library, create instances, execute methods, and
   generally perform reckless experiments quickly and cheaply in the manner
   that, for me, is the essence of Forth.

You can already do all this sort of stuff if you use systems like
Winterp, Elk and TCL.  What are missing in these that you think FORTH
will address?  Note I'm not arguing against allowing FORTH to link to
C++, X ... etc., I just don't think these issues should warp the
language in any way.  That is, if the interface is clean and optional,
go for it, if not drop it.


   C++ will be around for a long time.

So will COBOL and FORTRAN, it's in good company isn't it :-)

Finally, to those working on the free FORTH: more power to your
collective elbows; there is a potential user right here.

bevan