Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tektronix!reed!psu-cs!scowl From: scowl@psu-cs.UUCP (Scott W. Larson) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Forth and Functional Languages Message-ID: <968@psu-cs.UUCP> Date: 24 Sep 88 05:44:01 GMT References: <8809092121.AA09902@jade.berkeley.edu> <1625@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <7122@well.UUCP> <1643@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Reply-To: scowl@psu-cs.UUCP (Scott W. Larson) Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Portland State University; Portland OR Lines: 17 In article <1643@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> orr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) writes: >I agree that forth is a more powerful assembler than most, but it is still >an assembler. I don't want to use this assembler any more than any other, >(although I might like to use a compiler that had the advantage of producing >this more powerful machine model.) I'd like to see some justification for this comment! Why do you consider Forth to be just an assembler? Do you consider it to be an assembler because it is flexible, extensible, and easy to understand while compilers are rigid, complex, powerful monsters that produce highly complex code from complex high-level code? While Forth might be on the very lowest end of high-level lan- guages, writing Forth is far closer to writing in Pascal than writing 68000 assembler code! I suspect you're confusing the two because people who write in Forth, like those who write assembly code, don't view the compiler (or assembler) nor the compiled (assembled) code as hopelessly complex and mysterious.