smart stuff

The forth programmer ...walks across the bridge

Dr.Altaica posted this to the comp.lang.forth :-)

 The C Programmer
    God consults with the C programmer on every major issue. (As anyone
    who study's processor design knows all to well.)
        The C programmer can walk on water.

 The VB Programmer
    The VB programmer does lunch with God every day.
    He is an olympic class swimmer.

 The Turbo Pascal Programmer
    The Turbo Pascal programmer occasionally has a word with God.
    He can swim pretty well.

 The Fortran Programmer
    The Fortran programmer sometimes catches a glimpse of God.
    He manages to keep himself afloat in shallow water.

 The QBASIC Programmer
   The QBASIC programmer knows who God is.
   He has trouble avoiding drowning in his own bathtub.

 The LOGO Progammer
   About the only thing a Logo programmer knows about GOD is that the
   word is short enough for him to sound out, but he has trouble spelling
   it.
   He needs someone else to cerry him across the water for him.

 The Assembly Language Programmer
   The assembly language programmer is God.
   He parts the water when he wishes to cross it.

 The Forth Programmer
   The Forth programmer don't view ever river he comes across as a
   challenge to his religious faith and just walks across the bridge.

Mini Spreadsheet

Check out this link.

Modelling in Forth

Elizabeth D. Rather posted this to the comp.lang.forth

 Actually, when I was working with Chuck he usually wrote it three times:
 1. "It can't possibly be that complicated."  Very simplistic model that
 captures the essence of the problem but ignores a lot of the requirements.

 2. "But you have to handle these other situations..." Complications get
 added to handle more and more of the requirements, encrusted on the original
 base.

 3. "Ah, now I see what we need."  Starting over from scratch, he can now
 build a clean implementation that accomodates all the requirements from the
 ground up.

 Unfortunately, many projects end up with an extended Stage 2, and never
 progress to Stage 3.  Chuch always had the courage to grasp when it became
 necessary to abandon Stage 2 and start over, even though it often caused
 consternation for the customer!

RetroWeb

Yes, Stefan does like Forth :-).

RetroWeb is an extension of RetroForth for creating XHTML documents.It features a readable and elegant Lisp-like syntax to ease writing XHTML. It is quite small, very extensible and gives you the full power of Forth when you need it.

link

#forth at 4am

Stefan sent me this :-).

 <madgarden>    Heh... "Saying that Java is nice because it works on all
                OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it
                works on all genders"
 <hefner>       nice quote, shame I can't hang that one up at work..
 <madgarden>    Write it in the bathroom stall, who'll ever know? ;)

Retroforth 7.4

RetroForth is a compact, open source Forth development system. It can be used under FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS, Windows, SCO OpenServer, or as an operating system. It is easy very easy to learn, use, and extend with standard libraries like SDL, and it can also be used to create tight, stand-alone applications.

Changes: This release adds quite a bit of new functionality. Support for aliases, filling memory ranges, and finding addresses of functions has been added. The native version has a serial console, serial port support, parallel port support, hard drive support, and interrupts. There are also two new ports using libc, one of which has support for using shared libraries. A few minor bugs in the conditionals were fixed.

freshmeat.net/redir/retroforth/35324/url_homepage/www.retroforth.org

Forth "versus" Whatever

From comp.lang.forth

 >>Which brings me to an excellent 'forthism' I once read in a
 >> newsletter.  It stated:
 >>
 >>     "You can do anything in Forth - but you must be prepared
 >>     to do it yourself."
 In a recent discussion in c.l.functional, about why popular languages
 are popular, I summarized the relationship between Lisp and Forth
 more-or-less as follows:
 "From the Lisper's perspective, every other language is a cute subset
 of lisp; whereas from the Forther's perspective, every other language
 is a cute extension of Forth."

Re: Forth, Befunge, Whitespace, or Malborge: which is hardest to write buggy code in?

(Source: comp.lang.forth)

  >>Here is a version of Forth that runs under Windows, written in Whitespace:
  >
  >>
  >>I can't get it to run.  Do you think my browser has clobbered the code?
  Hmmm. I did exactly as the web page[1] suggests: "What do you do? Simply
  print it out and delete the file, ready to type in at a later date.
  Nobody will know that your blank piece of paper is actually vital
  computer code!"  I sure hope that I didn't mistake my only copy of the
  source code for an ordinary blank page!

  Perhaps writing my Befunge[2] compiler in Malborge[3] and then making it
  to a Forth[4] compiler written in Whitespace[1] wasn't such a good idea...

 References:
 1 http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/
 2 http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Befunge/
 3 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=28147
 4 http://www.cbel.com/forth_programming_language/

Forth Database

Richard S. Westmoreland postd this to the Forth-ML.

 In years past, we have implemented some extremely complicated databases in
 Forth.  The first was done in the mid 1970's for the company Cybek in NJ,
 and it was used in some extremely complex applications.  FORTH, Inc. also
 did some very complex databases for other companies, one of which was still
 in use last time I checked, at www.calmuni.com.  That one was a
 2-dimensional database, with a huge bit matrix in the center used to
 calculate overlapping bonded indebtedness.  A few years ago my contact  there
 told me that a state agency had just spent several million $$ trying to
 replicate it using modern database tools, but the result was too large and
 too slow to be usable.

 In the late 1980's we added class-based techniques to it, which many people
 liked (although I personally preferred the earlier, simpler version).

 It's hard to describe the whole approach in a newsgroup post, though.  It
 certainly didn't resemble SQL!