5 - Forth Interest Group

pemtely to understand what
on earth you do mean in
invoking "traditional Forth,"
as you keep doing.
"I use 'Forth' to refer to
the language as descriid
in the books ated most
often as references:
Starting Forth and
7binking Fotth by Leo
Brodie, and Forth: A T&
and R efae by Kelly
and Spies."
At last., a workable & f~-
tion! However, these fine
books all make it very dear
that, although they discuss
such things as dictionary
structure for pedagogic pur-
poses, implementations do
vary. Primarily, they define
Forth behaviorally, just as
ANS Forth does. I quote from
Kelly & Spies (pg. 30%):
"The Forth standards
wisely make no attempt
to define how the lan-
guage works internally.
The point of the stan-
dards is to promote a
fundional compatibility of
programs, not to stifle
original ways of adapting
Forth to new hardware."
Couldn't have said it bet-
ter myself.
I "Several of the languages
I have used ... are de-
scribed as 'functional'
languages.. . Eachof these
languages is desaibed in
terms of a set of opera-
tors. In each case, how-
ever, the operators act on
a specific data type or
types. . . It is meaningless
to have operators that do
not operate on anything!
"The ANSI Team has ap parently not only invented
a new language, but also
a new concept in com-
figure S&, continued.)
: @@ \ ( 'body -- x y )
dup >r x y r y