Re: part 21 asserts forth best for small memory systems, would lisp be better in non small mem?

John Doty <jpd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Elizabeth D Rather wrote:
> > John Doty wrote:
> > ....
> >> Please leave the argument in place. To snip here is evasion.
> > 
> > Ok.
> > 
> >> My argument is:
> >>
> >> 1. There is little published shareable Forth code, relative to other 
> >> languages. This seems beyond dispute.
> >>
> >> 2. You and others asserted that this is not because Forth code is not

> >> shareable, but because shareable code is proprietary, and that there 
> >> is plenty of such code.
> >>
> >> This requires that somehow Forth, unlike other programming languages,

> >> produces shareable code only if code is not to be published. If this 
> >> is true, it indicates weaknesses in Forth. Weaknesses, if correctly 
> >> identified, may often be repaired.
> >>
> >>>
> >>> There!  Right there, you repeat your basic logical error.  You have 
> >>> not established any "this requires that..." or "an unavoidable 
> >>> consequence" link.
> >>
> >> There, right there, you repeat your basic evasion. How is it that 
> >> Forth can only produce proprietary code?
> > 
> > Forth can certainly produce sharable, publishable code.  There is 
> > nothing whatever intrinsic to Forth that precludes sharable code.  The

> > reason there isn't a lot of published code has nothing to do with
Forth 
> > but a lot to do with the cultures in which it is most widely used.
> 
> You just contradicted yourself, and took a step toward a possible 
> reason. If Forth was acceptable to to the cultures that produce 
> publishable code (as it once was!) there would be no issue. So, we 
> merely restate the problem: what drove those cultures that produce 
> publishable code away from Forth?
> 
> Don't try the "fa****on" baloney. The world's experts in astronomical 
> instrumentation don't give a hoot about fa****on: they care about what 
> gets the job done. That's why they once embraced unfa****onable Forth, 
> and I believe also why they dropped it as the alternatives matured and 
> Forth remained frozen in an immature state.

What did the world's experts in astronomical instrumentation publish
during the time they used Forth? I do not doubt that they did publish
but I am curious whether their publications actually included
anything about the software used (let alone published code).
I know only of Julian article in a journal on computational physics
(I do not know the exact reference right now), but he was probably
not in the groups of astronomers you meant.

You may also want to reconsider the following questions:

(a) what particular weakness of the Icelandic language prevents its
use in comp.lang.forth?

(b) what made european scientists abandon Latin as common language?

(c) what drove scientists away from German towards English as a language
to publish in?

(d) what particular property of the number 2 is responsible for it
being a zero of the polynomial  X^2 - 4X + 4  ?

In each of the above, you will find that concentrating on an explanation
in terms only of the particular individual object does not go far in
answering the question.

Marc