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From: orr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Fraser Orr)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: New Features for Forth
Message-ID: <1654@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 22 Sep 88 18:54:58 GMT
References: <1593@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <810002@hpmtlx.HP.COM>
Reply-To: orr%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.ucl.ac.uk (Fraser Orr)
Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland
Lines: 47

In article <810002@hpmtlx.HP.COM> adam@hpmtlx.HP.COM ($Adam Kao) writes:
>About RPN:  Fraser, living in Europe you should understand this better than
>most Americans.  The most effective way to communicate with someone else is
>to speak THEIR language, not make them speak yours.  

No, I would say that no matter what language is a serious barrier.
If I learn to speak French, it will still be a problem, because I
will speak french badly and inefficiently to a Frenchman. Now if he
learns English, then he will be equally inefficient in communicating
with me. So then with computers language is also going to be a barrier.
The question is who should put in the effort learning the new language?
The Frenchman of course! :->

>Don't think I mean we should all program in assembly language (though I do
>think we should all know how).  My point is that Forth provides all the
>power of a high-level language while maintaining direct control of the
>low level bits.  I know that when I program in C or Lisp I often feel
>totally isolated from the hardware - not insulated, ISOLATED.  

I find it hard to believe that you feel isolated from the hardware
when programming in C. It is important to be able to communicate
with the raw machine from a programming language, but I believe that
this can be done effectively by hiding the machine behind a pretty
model. TO put it another way, you don't have to sacrifice every
benefit of HLLs to get FULL access to the machine. Now as to Forth
having all the advantages of an HLL, what ones were you refering to?

>I NEED to know what's going on in some memory location to fix my bugs.
>That's why there are so many debuggers for C and so few for Forth.

This sort of thing is useful for hardware control certainly, but not
for data control. Give me a symbolic debugger any day.:^>

>repeating (and rereading).  If you want to understand Forth, (and I don't
>think you should argue about what you don't understand) you MUST read this
>book.  If you've read it already, read it again, more carefully.

Thank you for the advice, can I add a few texts to the comp.lang.forth
reading list  Say for example, the C reference manual, the Miranda
reference manual, Software Engineering a practitioners approach
etc (please read all before you are knowledgeable enough to
contribute...;^)

>Adam

Best Regards,
===Fraser