Re: advantages of forth over other languages

helmwo@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> Many of the seen disadvantages are the advantages someone else sees.

Sure.  But that doesn't make it any less of a disadvantage to the person 
evaluating it.  My point is simply that you can't approach comparing 
languages in terms of absolutes.  When a Forther proudly declares that 
with Forth you can have direct access to the hardware, that's a clear 
advantage for embedded systems programming, but is little advantage to 
someone doing (for example) web-applications.  That's a singular example.

> I seriously think that Forth needs to go away from that "only good for
> embedded applications" image. Also in embedded world memory and
> processor power gets cheaper and cheaper and the need for a small i.e.
> Forth decreases with every month.

Forth gets away from the "only good for embedded applications" when 
there is demonstrated evidence to the contrary.  Don't tell me that 
Forth can compete favorably in those other domains-- show me the 
applications.  What most people in comp.lang.forth seem to be doing is 
to say, "Forth works well for me in my embedded systems work, so clearly 
it must scale well and be competitive in other domains."  Prove it.

> But how common are these languages? 

Depends on the problem domain, doesn't it?  Take one problem domain-- 
web applications-- and you'll find that C is a minority language there. 
  Most anything serious in that problem domain is based on a scripting 
language (or if you believe Sun, Java).

 > And I fear you mean the "C" up to
> C# or even Perl and such ;)

Three of the most common features of Forth that people point to when 
comparing against C is interactivity, extensibility, and the ability to 
do run-time evaluation.  And yes, when you compare against C, that's 
true.  But most scripting languages give you all that and more.  And 
beyond the world of scripting, we have languages like Smalltalk and Lisp 
(and the family of languages that come from them) that either pre-date 
or were concurrent with Forth that provide the same features.

My point is that for people who are limited by Forth and C, the 
advantages of Forth are clear.  For those without such limits, the 
advantages of Forth are less strong.