Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!lll-lcc!well!jax
From: jax@well.UUCP (Jack J. Woehr)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Forth "Pre-Compiler" (long)
Summary: When You Are Rich, Not Only Are You Handsome, But You Sing Well, Too!
Keywords: AT&T, Utilities, Baden, Editor, Yiddish_Proverbs
Message-ID: <6826@well.UUCP>
Date: 16 Aug 88 06:00:05 GMT
References: <8808032106.AA01436@jade.berkeley.edu> <1563@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <2651@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1567@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Reply-To: jax@well.UUCP (Jack J. Woehr)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 35

In article <1567@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> orr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) writes:
>In article <2651@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown) writes:
>>In article <1563@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> orr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) writes:
>>}If I were being equally glib(-:) I might ask, how come if forth is so much
>>}easier to program in, have forth programmers not managed to produce these
>>}essential tools in and for forth?
>>
	Good sport and loyal comp.lang.forth poster Fraser goes on
to compare a short stack of 8 Laxen & Perry F83 utilities to 39 unix
utilities.

	Straw dogs. Some utils mentioned like   vi   are much harder to
use than the minimalist line editor! Certainly the Wil Baden full
screen editor in F83X,F83S is a masterpiece of programming, in Forth
or any other language.

	Other unix utils are easily mimicked intepretively in Forth,
and do not require inclusion in a "master set" of compile utils.
Utils performing passes on block files analogous to, say,   grep  or
   wc    can be entered at the keyboard, and are, by professional forth
programmers. These types of utils are personalized and given functional
relevance not by -abcd command line options, but by being re-written
each time they are used! That's the kind of rapid-flow, free form
doggie Forth is!

	Lastly, if Forth had had twenty-odd years of corporate sponsorship
from a mega-billion $ (thousand million to our friends on the other side
of the Atlantic River) conglomerate, there would be enough utils written
and canonized to bury your 12Meg mainframe as deep as a Celtic king in
a peat bog!

***********
well!jax@lll-winken.arpa	"Keep your xi-stack"           
JAX on GEnie	"I'll show you my interpreter if you'll show me yours!"
jax@chariot.UUCP " Forth programmers get it up faster!"