Elizabeth D Rather <erather@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> Aleksej Saushev wrote:
> ...
>> I think, the the whole Forth community would benefit much from
>> simple project: overview of that famous Taygeta archive.
>> It will cut Forth proponents down to size, and probably force
>> them to think about the high quality of software, they're so
>> much proud of.
>
> The Taygeta archive is mostly a relic of the hobbyist era of
> Forth (the 80's). AFAIK, in 35 years of successful Forth
> programming, no one at FORTH, Inc. has used it. So, I'm not
> sure what your point is.
>
> ...
>>
>> The rapid development is another frequent point of Forth proponents,
>> let's see: string processing, list processing (if you sacrifice
>> performance to speed of development, if not, add balanced trees
>> and/or other more complex structures), networking, database
>> connection (even simple one, Berkeley-style). Pretty many of
>> usual things, you have to deal with _from_scratch_. And this is
>> all basic stuff, you don't need to take care of, if you have
>> ready libraries. In Forth communities I've seen only one way
>> to close the gap: through FFI to C-written libraries.
>
> Well, that's a very specific list of desiderata, obviously for a
> particular class of applications. It is appropriate, as John
> Passiniti frequently observes, to chose a language that's a good
> match for your application domain. Forth might or might not be
> it; that's no fault of Forth, no one language is ideal for all
> application domains.
>
> In the world I work in, embedded systems, we need none of the
> features on your list. In the past, you've deprecated embedded
> systems programming, but the fact is there are far, far more
> microcontrollers in use in embedded systems than all the PCs and
> mainframes in the world (a typical new car has over 100, for
> example). In embedded systems, you need easy and intimate
> access to hardware features and I/O under development, extremely
> low overhead I/O and interrupt handling, and (in most cases) low
> memory requirements. Forth excels at all this.
From what I hear around, Forth is abandoned in favour of mixture
of C and assembly. You are in minority, but this minority happens
everywhere.
> And all the Forths adapted for Windows and *nix hosted platforms
> do feature easy mechanisms for calling C or other subroutines,
> so their users have the same access to libraries as anyone else.
I doubt that either.
It is a miracle, if you transparently create NUL-terminated strings
from pointer-counter pairs, and get the latter from the former at
the same ease. And I don't believe in such miracles.
--
BECHA...
CKOPO CE3OH...
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