Re: A Brief Look at History

Elizabeth D Rather wrote:

> Jonah Thomas wrote:

<snip>

> > I'll bet if you find a hundred people who've never used
> > Forth but who've heard of it, 98 of them will have heard
> > it's unreadable. Probably 5 or 10 of them will have heard
> > the story about the Forth programmers who couldn't read
> > their own code. This says nothing about how hard it is to
> > read Forth code, what commenting styles would help, or how
> > many Forth programmers have trouble reading their own code.
> 
> Yes, that's the classic response from people who've heard of
> Forth but don't know anything about it.  A lot of this,
> unfortunately, originated in the 80's, when there were many
> articles in Byte, Dr Dobbs, and other places about Forth. 
> They all included code, and in virtually all cases the 
> magazines "edited" the code to "fix" things like removing
> spaces before "punctuation" such as commas, periods,
> semicolons, etc., "fixing" spelling, and other things that
> rendered the code utterly gibberish.  I wrote some of those
> articles, and screamed loudly, but the mags said there was
> nothing they could do, it was their art dept (code was
> considered "illustration").  Folks can't be blamed for
> concluding that stuff was unreadable, and unfortunately
> that's the only Forth a lot of folks have seen.

   Well we certainly don't have that problem anymore since now
articles about Forth don't get printed in such magazines. So
what should be done about all those people who think Forth is
unreadable? Should I suggest showing them some Forth code that
can be read? Now we can supply program code over the web without
any of the spaces getting lost or the punctuation getting
edited. 

   The idea that Forth code can't be read unless you understand
how to write Forth code in the first place is complete baloney.
And I'm being excessively polite here. Forth is the easiest
programming language in the world to read when somebody like Leo
Brodie writes about it. Too bad we can't get more inspiration
from him.

--
Michael Coughlin   m-coughlin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   Cambridge, MA USA