comp.lang.forth Google Group

Re: acceptance of forth

jethom...@gmail.com (Jonah Thomas) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 01:07:57 UT

Agreed.
Strongly agreed.
Yes, definitely.
Yes. Though I think the sexuality thing made it more of a hot button
than many other issues would have been.

Re: acceptance of forth

john.passan...@gmail.com (John Passaniti) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:47:15 UT

Interesting how you conflate things. I don't have "supporters" in
comp.lang.forth. What you saw wasn't some great love, acceptance, or
even moderate concern for me, but rather a critical review of *your*
words and behavior. I expect that everyone you consider a "supporter"
of mine would have written exactly the same thing to you regardless of

Re: symtab

john.passan...@gmail.com (John Passaniti) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:32:57 UT

On Nov 25, 5:10 am, Andrew Haley <andre...@littlepinkcloud.inva lid>
wrote:
No real mystery: As the load factor of the hash table increases, the
cost of probing around to insert or find a key can get quite
expensive. In applications where hashes play a critical role (such as
many scripting languages that do dynamic lookup of functions and other

Re: LC53 statistics

stephen...@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:54:30 UT

Interpretation and compilation refer to when the text is processed.
It is perfectly legal for a system encountering ";" while interpreting
to issue an error message.
In essence, run-time refers to what happens when the compiled code
executes, which is to return from the word. run-time is one time
frame later than interetation and compilation.

Re: acceptance of forth

erat...@forth.com (Elizabeth D Rather) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:41:01 UT

The context of my question was that someone reported that his superiors
rejected Forth in favor of a scripting language because they "didn't
need all that stuff". I was just looking for a quantitative measure of
what "all that stuff" was. I agree with John that there may be good
functional reasons to prefer a tool specifically designed for scripting

Re: symtab

john.passan...@gmail.com (John Passaniti) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:32:56 UT

I had also wrote that (1) I am new to Factor, (2) I only casually
reviewed your code, (3) that I didn't find your code's comments clear,
and that as a result (4) I might not understand your code. I invited
you to explain what I got wrong. You didn't respond. This was 49
days ago.
Oh, like a splay tree. Why didn't you say so? Probably because you

Re: LC53 statistics

j...@qualdan.com (Josh Grams) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:16:29 UT

ron wrote:
Yeah, most systems don't have truly separate interpretation and
compilation semantics: gforth is one of the few systems that does.
Sure, but it does that at compile time, so it only needs compilation
semantics.
From the standard:
Interpretation: Interpretation semantics for this word are undefined.

Re: LC53 statistics

an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:55:37 UT

Yes, most Forth systems implement ";" as immediate word (which has
interpretation semantics), and/or implement ' and ['] such that they
produce an xt for the compilation semantics, if a word is
compile-only. So they don't complain when you tick ";", they produce
some xt.
No, the compilation semantics of ";" is to compile an EXIT, switch to

Re: programmer(s) of the Forth on OLPC project ?

hwfw...@gmail.com (Brad) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:02:38 UT

On Nov 24, 8:28 am, an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac. at (Anton Ertl)
wrote:
If you look back in the c.l.f archives (or maybe do a web search) you
can find a link to the location of the source code released by Mitch.
Good stuff.
-Brad

Re: acceptance of forth

an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:30:42 UT

They all seem very individual to me. The "institutional backing" is
just that they let these people work on these languages, not more.
Anyway, Forth became quite popular in the 70s and 80s, and at some
point a number of people worked on Forth at big institutions with that
amount of backing. E.g., John Hayes and Marty Fraeman at Johns

Re: LC53 statistics

r...@ronware.org (ron) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:51:41 UT

On Nov 25, 1:14 pm, an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac. at (Anton Ertl)
wrote:
Thanks Anton, that explains it concisely enough. Reva lets you take
the address of ';' (or any other word, though it may not evaluate to
an executable address) -- I'm pretty sure I could do that in other
Forths as well, but it's been a while since I played with them

Forth as scripting language (was: continued fractions)

an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:18:11 UT

Yes. I actually know awk and regexps, and use them regularly, but
there are cases where I use Forth, e.g., in the repost program:
[link]
Here I used Forth, because I don't know how to deal with sockets in
awk.
I don't do that. Instead, for files I use SLURP-FILE, and for

Re: acceptance of forth

ken...@cix.compulink.co.uk — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:32:37 UT

In article
<67d462c1-2352-42e9-a243-8be72 3091...@e20g2000vbb.googlegrou ps.com>,
I was never that keen on Yanks, the sense of smug self satisfaction
grinds. Your attempts at justifying your self seems to me to be counter
productive. It is certainly confirming my prejudice against US citizens.
I do not know what image you want to project but as it is I would go

Re: continued fractions

jethom...@gmail.com (Jonah Thomas) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:33:33 UT

You don't need it.
[link]
Note that when you get a continued fraction for pi the issue is not that
you have a continued fraction for pi. What you will do with it is
multiply it by stuff. And the best continued fraction is the one that
gives you the right product the most times, with perhaps some other

Semantics (was: LC53 statistics)

an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:30:39 UT

Yes. That's programming language terminology. A language (or
language construct) has syntax and semantics. I.e., semantics is
pretty much everything that is not syntax. In Forth that means "what
it does".
That would be uses of the various semantics, and you did not quite get
them correct. From the usage side, execution semantics are not really