Why Forth was never teached : another tale before going to bed or to share at the Christmas tree

[Peter Forth]

For this Christmas-Forth season, I have a whish :

I whish to know arguments why Forth was never teached elsewhere
of course, there are probably some exceptions, but out of the scope
of my question.

I would really like to know the opinion of people who knows
or can guess why you think Forth was never teached widely
in computer language curriculums, like Basic, C , Pascal,
now Python etc...

Of course I am not interested you tell me about efforts of any FIG since
I am preocupied with general cases, not excepcionall cases or special efforts
of the well known groups we all know, I am so thankfull for their existence.

I can imagine the simplest answer is because the market was not interested
on forth programmers, this is too simple, I whish we can understand further
and elaborate.

It is also interesting to know at which places there was a curriculum of
forth, of course not including the Forth vendors.

I thank in advance for your answers.

Cheers
Peter

[dxforth]

Perhaps academia saw Forth in the same light as industry.

"Forth is a religion, and we've kind of decided right now
not to participate in religion, one side or the other."
- Philippe Kahn ('Computer Language' Aug 1985)

[Zbig]

> "Forth is a religion, and we've kind of decided right now
> not to participate in religion, one side or the other."
> - Philippe Kahn ('Computer Language' Aug 1985)

...which obviously translates to: "...because we don't like Forth, and 'we've kind of decided right now' to not disclose our rationale".

My personal guess is: the "problem with Forth" is that Forth programmer cannot be easily replaced with another one (in case he wants a raise, for example).

We've got here (in Poland) a smartass businessman - Mr. Filipiak - who created a saying: "every specialist programmer can be replaced with finite number of students". So this is probably approach of most "industry" of today: easily replaceable programmers - "the gear is here, why not use it", quality of software doesn't matter that much anymore. If anything goes wrong - never mind, "online updates" are available (how many times each week our Android phones are "updating" various pieces of software?) etc. etc.

[Peter Forth]

Yes ! I remember that argumentation of forth beying a religion...
a sad difamation.

Now triying to understand why they said that, it could be associated
to the behaviour of people who represented the forth community ?

The mysticism Hugh was mentioning in another post. But what is mysticism?
Mysticism has place when something is not well explained !
I had in the last times some people causing trouble to my site because
I teach Forth for free(they disfarced the complaint with a copyright issue
because they could not find anything more absurd, but their dream is
to take all free forths sites from the map).
(the same people were never happy with FIG chapters and Forth PD)

Then from my own experience (+ the people I met who try to learn Forth)
I saw that the basic concept of the stack etc( entry level concepts)
are incredible easy to understand, even a trained monkey would learn forth
if that would be all.

But then what follows is like a ladder that suddenly has no more
steps. Yo definetively have to jump to get to the next level !
It depends if you learn further techniques from your own attitude of research
and digg to find a path, if there is one...

ASM programmers on the other hand found forth clear to
understand, since Forth deals with internals of a VM,
the same concepts as in a real cpus : registers addresses alu etc.

Engineers, scientists and physicist, who daily work in research and know how
you have to digg to understand concepts, also know the mechanics of creating
mental models to resolve a problem (like creating your own POL can resolve
a task ! = problem oriented language)
those folks appear to have any problem learning forth, for the contrary.

But the rest of the programming world which learned only
higher level languages based on concepts of abstracting the machine
as much as possible, could not find any sense on forth, and simplified
cataloguing forth as weird.

[hughag...@gmail.com]

On Friday, December 13, 2019 at 7:31:21 AM UTC-7, Peter Forth wrote:
> The mysticism Hugh was mentioning in another post. But what is mysticism?
> Mysticism has place when something is not well explained !

I agree with this definition of mysticism.

A good example is depicted in Isaac Isimov's "Foundation" in which
the operation of a nuclear power plant becomes the job of priests
and monks who perform ritual procedures that run the reactor but
they don't understand anything about the reactor or even understand
that it is based on physics rather than religion.

My point in regard to Forth is that computer science can't be
disregarded (the way the priests and monks disregarded physics).
It is a very bad idea to replace programming knowledge with
a lot of hand-waving about the "Forth Way" as done at Forth Inc.
because this tends to conceal the good points about Forth
under a steaming pile of "marketing genius."

I have previously described Elizabeth Rather as the Pope of Forth.
She really doesn't understand basic computer science.
This is why the ANS-Forth cult arose, replacing programming knowledge.

[dxforth]

On Friday, December 13, 2019 at 11:45:49 PM UTC+11, Zbig wrote:
> > "Forth is a religion, and we've kind of decided right now
> > not to participate in religion, one side or the other."
> > - Philippe Kahn ('Computer Language' Aug 1985)
>
> ...which obviously translates to: "...because we don't like Forth, and 'we've kind of decided right now' to not disclose our rationale".

In which case he could have said 'We have no plans for that'. Borland would
go on to do Pascal/Delphi, C, Modula2, BASIC - safe, respectable languages
that had a history in academia.

>
> My personal guess is: the "problem with Forth" is that Forth programmer cannot be easily replaced with another one (in case he wants a raise, for example).
>
> We've got here (in Poland) a smartass businessman - Mr. Filipiak - who created a saying: "every specialist programmer can be replaced with finite number of students". So this is probably approach of most "industry" of today: easily replaceable programmers - "the gear is here, why not use it", quality of software doesn't matter that much anymore. If anything goes wrong - never mind, "online updates" are available (how many times each week our Android phones are "updating" various pieces of software?) etc. etc.

We've had politicians like that since the 80's :)

[Zbig]

> In which case he could have said 'We have no plans for that'. Borland would
> go on to do Pascal/Delphi, C, Modula2, BASIC - safe, respectable languages
> that had a history in academia.

This is similar like in case of the term "hate speech". What actually "hate speech" is? It is "opinion we don't like at all". Simple.

And what is "programming language we don't like at all"? It is "religion". So "we" don't need any other rationale "why not". Wasn't it "religion" "we" could risk a question: "but why actually you have no plans for exactly that, having plans for Pascal/Delphi, C, Modula2, BASIC?".

[dxforth]

Wasn't the reference to religion enough explanation from Borland for its
not wanting to get involved? No vendor external to Forth has gotten
involved. I could call Forth a club of believers inspired by the messiah
Moore and the world would know exactly what I was talking about as it's
had them before.

[Rick C]

It would be hard for a mainstream vendor to promote something as "dangerous" as Forth. Forth is a language that gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself and so not so good as a commercial product. It's bad enough when you find the occasional bug in a program that crashes the OS, but to have to reboot repeatedly while trying to debug your own code is not such a great idea. Back in the days of DOS and Win95, etc that's what would happen. Not so much REPL as code, run, crash.

--

Rick C.

- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

[hughag...@gmail.com]

If Charles Moore is Jesus Christ, then Elizabeth Rather is Saul! ;-)

To a large extent, the Christian religion was founded by Saul,
not Jesus Christ --- essentially all of the doctrines of Christianity
were Saul's invention --- Jesus Christ never wrote anything down,
and he only made one speech (the Sermon on the Mount) that was
rather vague, so he can't be described as founding Christianity.
Jesus Christ was mostly a circus magician, turning water into wine,
walking on water, casting demons into pigs, etc. --- little or nothing
is known about his philosophy or any ideas that he may have thunk.

In both Christianity and ANS-Forth the true believers routinely
project their own ideas (or ignorance) onto their Messiah, trotting
out old quotes of the Messiah to make it seem as if he totally
supports them. In neither case is there any evidence to indicate
that he supports the fountain of crap they have built in his name.

[dxforth]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 at 4:22:44 PM UTC+11, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, December 14, 2019 at 6:52:52 PM UTC-7, dxforth wrote:
> > On Sunday, December 15, 2019 at 4:13:20 AM UTC+11, Zbig wrote:
> > > > In which case he could have said 'We have no plans for that'. Borland would
> > > > go on to do Pascal/Delphi, C, Modula2, BASIC - safe, respectable languages
> > > > that had a history in academia.
> > >
> > > This is similar like in case of the term "hate speech".
> > > What actually "hate speech" is?
> > > It is "opinion we don't like at all". Simple.
> > >
> > > And what is "programming language we don't like at all"?
> > > It is "religion". So "we" don't need any other rationale "why not".
> > > Wasn't it "religion" "we" could risk a question:
> > > "but why actually you have no plans for exactly that,
> > > having plans for Pascal/Delphi, C, Modula2, BASIC?".
> >
> > Wasn't the reference to religion enough explanation from Borland for its
> > not wanting to get involved? No vendor external to Forth has gotten
> > involved. I could call Forth a club of believers inspired by the messiah
> > Moore and the world would know exactly what I was talking about as it's
> > had them before.
>
> If Charles Moore is Jesus Christ, then Elizabeth Rather is Saul! ;-)
>
> To a large extent, the Christian religion was founded by Saul,
> not Jesus Christ

Wouldn't the parallel to Saul be FIG - spreading Forth throughout
the world much to the chagrin of its creators? :)

[trebor....@gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 7:33:44 PM UTC-5, Peter Forth wrote:

> I whish to know arguments why Forth was never teached elsewhere

If you compare the PDP-11 with the DG Nova, The PDP-11 sold 10 times as many machines. I think the Nova gets more done in less time with fewer chips and fewer watts. The PDP-11 is easier to teach. With the Nova, for example, every arithmetic or logic instruction can skip the next instruction if the current instruction results in zero or carry. With the PDP-11 you have an add instruction, one thought, followed by a branch if carry, another thought, separate. Thinking ahead to do two things in one step to gain an advantage is like playing chess. One simple thing at a time is like, wait, I'm having trouble thinking of a dumb enough comparison. It is really hard to teach chess. Academics don't do that. Poker can be played while drunk.

Along the same lines, it is possible for one person to think clearly, not so much a committee. Employers are unable to manage a complicated project, think chess, so they need programmers to be added to catch up when the project gets behind. It is necessary to put nine women on the job to make the baby in one month. With academics claiming that they can teach BASIC programmers (or COBOL, or FORTRAN, or C) then they can claim that they, academics, have purpose and value. Brand new programmers can be easily added to a job late without disruption. Also, programmers are cheap to train, cheap to hire. Thirty minutes into a chess match can one of the players be replaced? Can a third player be added?

This NOT to say that BASIC or PDP-11 programmers are idiots. It is that chess is hard to teach. Kasparov did not hire a team of FORTRAN programmers to teach him chess. IBM did have a chess master on the payroll when programming Deep Blue. Forth is hard to teach.

[me]

On Sunday, December 15, 2019 at 8:44:31 AM UTC-6, trebor...@gmail.com wrote:

> Forth is hard to teach.

why?

In industry no manager in his right mind would commit to using brand-X in a
project. Anything that goes wrong will be because of brand-X.
Knew a manager who bought a brand-X mini rather than a DEC because it was
cheaper and had better Fortran. Marketing, who later came in and ran the project,
gave him hell. Customers understood DEC but now marketing had to explain why they
were paying big bucks for a brand-X.
--
me

[Anton Ertl]

dxforth <dxf...@gmail.com> writes:
>Wasn't the reference to religion enough explanation from Borland for its
>not wanting to get involved?

If that's a satisfactory explanation for you, what else do you fall
for? For me it's a statement of intent. The actual reasons for this
decision were too boring for a character like Philippe Kahn to
explain, so he came up with something more exciting. My guesses for
the actual reasons are that

* He had no Forth equivalent of Anders Hejlsberg who wanted to work
for him.

* In 1985 the Forth marketplace was crowded with players, and
fig-Forth and F83 were available for free. Probably not a market
that was an easy picking.

* He already had a successful programming language implementation.
Why invest money in another one? Ok, shortly after Borland bought
and published a Prolog, a BASIC, and a C implementation, but Basic
and C were very popular, and Prolog was considered the hot new thing
(if he had decided against it, he would probably also have used the
"religion" explanation).

* Maybe he did not consider Forth to have enough mainstream appeal.
It it interesting to consider how Forth could have been trimmed for
mainstream appeal by a company like Borland, and amusing to think
how Forth traditionalists would have reacted.

>No vendor external to Forth has gotten
>involved.

That's a tautology.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
EuroForth 2019: http://www.euroforth.org/ef19/papers/

[Anton Ertl]

Rick C <gnuarm.del...@gmail.com> writes:
>It would be hard for a mainstream vendor to promote something as "dangerous=
>" as Forth. Forth is a language that gives you more than enough rope to ha=
>ng yourself and so not so good as a commercial product. It's bad enough wh=
>en you find the occasional bug in a program that crashes the OS, but to hav=
>e to reboot repeatedly while trying to debug your own code is not such a gr=
>eat idea. Back in the days of DOS and Win95, etc that's what would happen.=
> Not so much REPL as code, run, crash. =20

C and even Pascal also give you enough rope, and in CP/M and DOS, a
crashing program would crash the whole computer. So no, that's not
the reason.

[hughag...@gmail.com]

Creators??? I have said many times that Forth was created by
Charles Moore, who is a singular individual.
Elizabeth Rather contributed nothing. She has never created anything.
Also, I have said many times that (according to Jeff Fox),
Charles Moore was not chagrined by Fig spreading Forth throughout
the world --- he was okay with that, so long as they agreed to no
pirate any future Forth systems from him --- it was Elizabeth Rather
who hated Fig and wanted to hit them with a lawsuit.

You totally missed the point, as usual for you.
Fig didn't put its own spin on Forth.
Fig never upgraded FigForth or fixed any bugs because this was the deal
they made with Charles Moore, to not compete against his future systems.
Elizabeth Rather put a heavy spin on Forth.
She doesn't know how to implement a general-purpose data-structure,
so she hates the idea and demands that all Forthers hate it too.

Similarly, Saul put a heavy spin on Christianity. As I said:
"essentially all of the doctrines of Christianity were Saul's invention."
For example, Saul was impotent and so he hated women and demanded
that all Christians hate women too.
This is why women and considered to be sinful in Christianity,
which was the motivating idea behind burning them at the stake
during the Inquisition. The Malleus Maleficarum was written by
Heinrich Kramer who had similar mental-health problems as Saul.
Jesus Christ never said anything about women being sinful --- that was
entirely Saul's idea that he superimposed on Jesus Christ.

Of course, I'm putting my own spin on Forth too.
I am a big fan of quotations (I mean, of course, quotations that access
the parent function's locals despite the HOF having locals of its own).
This is the basis for implementing general-purpose data-structures.
General-purpose data-structures the only way that Forth can have a future.
I'm being honest though and not trying to pretend that I have
Charles Moore's support --- I don't think Charles Moore cares what
the Forth community does --- my read on him is that he considers the
Forth community to be idiotic wanna-bees lacking any creativity whatsoever.

Most likely, Jesus Christ also considers Christians to be
idiotic wanna-bees lacking any spirituality whatsoever.

[dxforth]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 at 3:48:11 AM UTC+11, Anton Ertl wrote:
> ...

> * He already had a successful programming language implementation.
> Why invest money in another one? Ok, shortly after Borland bought
> and published a Prolog, a BASIC, and a C implementation, but Basic
> and C were very popular, and Prolog was considered the hot new thing
> (if he had decided against it, he would probably also have used the
> "religion" explanation).

But did he? He knew he could poke fun at Forth when asked and get
away with it because it was obvious for all to see. And the joke is
nothing has changed. I don't mind. Besides which people who want
to spend their days programming computers are plainly nuts anyway.

[dxforth]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 at 9:35:06 AM UTC+11, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, December 15, 2019 at 2:44:16 AM UTC-7, dxforth wrote:
> > On Sunday, December 15, 2019 at 4:22:44 PM UTC+11, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > To a large extent, the Christian religion was founded by Saul,
> > > not Jesus Christ
> >
> > Wouldn't the parallel to Saul be FIG - spreading Forth throughout
> > the world much to the chagrin of its creators? :)
>
> Creators??? I have said many times that Forth was created by
> Charles Moore, who is a singular individual.

Who set up a commercial enterprise with a responsibility to the
other partners. FIG threatened the largely exclusive control
Forth Inc had held on Forth by spreading it far and wide. That's
the extent of the parallel I'd make - Forth would be a footnote
on a page in a history book were it not for FIG. Not that FIG
were exactly saints either :)

[Krishna Myneni]

When I worked as a lead engineer in industry, nearly two decades ago, I
did choose to use Forth for a prototyping project, involving controlling
a motion stage and doing data acquisition. To his credit, my manager
stayed out of decisions like this. My plan was to design and assemble the
hardware, and to bring another engineer up to speed on Forth programming
for writing the software. However, that did not pan out -- while the
engineer was competent in his area of expertise, programming (in any
language) was just not his forte. In the end, I did the programming task
in Forth, and the code just worked, both in the lab and in the field. The
most complex part of the task was figuring out the quirks of the software
commands for the motion stage, and we would have had to do that no matter
the language chosen for the project. The project was successfully
completed within a couple of months (a pretty short time frame) and
eventually led to a much larger engineering project, employing a full-
time programmer and a team of hardware engineers and technicians. By then
I had moved on to other things but I tried to interest the programmer in
using Forth for the project. He did experiment with it for a week or two,
but afterward he decided, apologetically, not to use Forth. Still, the
small prototyping project which used Forth proved to be successful and
led to several years of work for a team of engineers.

Krishna

[a...@littlepinkcloud.invalid]

dxforth <dxf...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Creators??? I have said many times that Forth was created by
>> Charles Moore, who is a singular individual.
>
> Who set up a commercial enterprise with a responsibility to the
> other partners.

Quite. Much of what we know of Forth, which ended up in fig-FORTH, was
the work of others at Forth, Inc., in particular Dean Sanderson.
Except in the very beginning, Forth was never the work of one man.

Andrew.

[Mark Wills]

Because Forth did not originate from the academic world, unlike BASIC.
C was also popular in academe due to it being the language that UNIX was
built on.

It's natural that computing students, having learned a particular programming
language in their academic studies - for example C or Fortran - are going to
take those skills into their working life and use them and build upon them.

[Mark Wills]

I've heard that argument before, but I'm not convinced. Any language that
permits direct memory access and direct hardware access is just as dangerous.

It is easier to write Forth code that ends up being a total mess, though. It
has to be crafted, and it takes some time to get a feel for it.

[Mark Wills]

On Sunday, 15 December 2019 22:35:06 UTC, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> Creators??? I have said many times that Forth was created by
> Charles Moore, who is a singular individual.
> Elizabeth Rather contributed nothing. She has never created anything.

It's true that Elizabeth had nothing to do with the creation of Forth
the language. But no-one is disputing that, are they? If they are they
are wrong. By the time of Kitt Peak, Forth the language was complete and
completely recognisable as the language we know today.

However, Elizabeth, along with Ed Konklin created Forth Inc. Charles told
me to my face at EuroForth in 2018 that without Elizabeth, Forth Inc.
would not exist because although he (Charles) was interested in making
money, he had no interest in running a business. He just wanted to code and
innovate.

He credits the success of Forth Inc. to Elizabeth. It's all in the interview
that I did with Charles in 2018:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX3kXbLmwn4

[dxforth]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 at 7:47:46 PM UTC+11, a...@littlepinkcloud.invalid wrote:
> ...

> Except in the very beginning, Forth was never the work of one man.

To successfully build on a structure that already exists only requires
competence. If new languages look familiar it's no coincidence.
Forth emerged from left field - the creation of a single person with
a unique vision.

[A. K.]

Compilation to Webassembly is getting popular for that reason.
You're sandboxed then.

> It is easier to write Forth code that ends up being a total mess, though. It
> has to be crafted, and it takes some time to get a feel for it.

What do you expect from a sandboxed Forth?

[a...@littlepinkcloud.invalid]

dxforth <dxf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Monday, December 16, 2019 at 7:47:46 PM UTC+11, a...@littlepinkcloud.invalid wrote:
>> ...
>> Except in the very beginning, Forth was never the work of one man.
>
> To successfully build on a structure that already exists only
> requires competence.

Well, that's an opinion you get to have. I strongly disagree. Evolving
programming languages is hard.

Andrew.

[Rick C]

That is my point. The use of the stack means many different types of mistakes can lead to corruptions and memory access failures, aka machine crashes. This can happen in other languages, but not nearly so often or with such dramatic results. This is not nearly such an issue now with more robust operating systems, but in the early days it was a significant issue.

Also, many of the early Forths were slow compared to other languages like C. I recall people at work talking about how slow Forth could be, so it never got a fair comparison really. I even tried to use it around 15 years ago and it had such a bad rep no one would let me buy a commercial copy.

--

Rick C.

+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

[Azathoth Hastur]

On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 7:33:44 PM UTC-5, Peter Forth wrote:
> For this Christmas-Forth season, I have a whish :
>
> I whish to know arguments why Forth was never teached elsewhere
> of course, there are probably some exceptions, but out of the scope
> of my question.
>
> I would really like to know the opinion of people who knows
> or can guess why you think Forth was never teached widely
> in computer language curriculums, like Basic, C , Pascal,
> now Python etc...
>
> Of course I am not interested you tell me about efforts of any FIG since
> I am preocupied with general cases, not excepcionall cases or special efforts
> of the well known groups we all know, I am so thankfull for their existence.
>
> I can imagine the simplest answer is because the market was not interested
> on forth programmers, this is too simple, I whish we can understand further
> and elaborate.
>
> It is also interesting to know at which places there was a curriculum of
> forth, of course not including the Forth vendors.
>
> I thank in advance for your answers.
>
> Cheers
> Peter

You mean taught?

[Azathoth Hastur]

With forth you not only don't need microsoft or oracle, but also intel amd and cisco and juniper!

You can make nice networks with less fuss and awesome apps and it messes up all the monoplies and regulation theft and ususry

[dxforth]

Certainly. I don't have the competence which is why I leave it alone.

[dxforth]

English may not be his native language. Your excuse?

[Peter Forth]

Yes Azathoth is my mistake sory for that, thank you for the correction.

[Peter Forth]

THis is an excellent answer to my question, I get a lot of information
I can compare this with my life experience and why I became a Forth programmer
and Forth addict.
I also went out of forth many times in my life, 3 times when I first entered
in contact with Forth, and changed to different hardware. My first contact
with forth was with a 6502 SBC where we used a romable Fig forth, typed from
the listing, and we installed this forth to give our photon counter the chance
to print, communicate over serial , and send the meassurment data out in casette
tape.
Without Forth, (before we only used MASM) this project would not be finished
in the time we did it. I think we reduced 1 year work to 4 months.
Then I went to 68000 Architecture on diverse computers, and even I went first
to look for a Forth, I ended programming in Basic+ASM routine calls. It was
easier to go arround some floating point and rounding problems, it was much
faster to advance than in Forth. So I abandoned forth, I can understand
your helping programmers why they stepped away.(I tought I was taking a shortcut on that time) but some months later, we started having rounding problems again
and machine deviations from its path. There was no chance to advance anymore
with that basic and asm routines, so I gave Forth another chance, rewriting all
my previous code, with new eyes, and more experience. Probabaly my mistake
was lack of experience with forth in the numerical representation storage and
overflow, it was my programmer mistake, not caused by the language.
But the advantage of Forth for me on that moment, was to have better tools
to debug the full process, and that the ASM was already in CODE END-CODE format so I had the whole environment in 1 package. The incremental compilation
helped me a lot in the debugging, since I encapsulated the problem in small
units that I could inspect separated from the rest of the program (which was
very large indeed).
This program I wrote during a 2 year period, it was a PCB prototyping program.
You entered a Gerber FIle, the program converted to BitmapGraphics, and inverted the image to negative (white pixels become black, and viceversa)then
that image was rastered to vectors again, but on G code, that our forth CNC
controller (another module) transformed into discrete steps&direction signals
to control a small cnc table.
THis was ending the 80s and we moved again from 68K machines
to LMI URforth, which is also mentioned in this thread and I consider till today
the best forth I programmed , where we could create an executable with it, and
sell without paying royalties (as with Forth inc case) , it was fast, realiable
and a full professional product without doubt.
The URforth 32 bit, with the Phar Lap extender permitted us on that time
to work with 4gigabyte files, with virtual memory on the HD. Without this
fundamental features, we could never have ended our PCB prototype Isolation
product (which was sold by >1000 units during the next decade).
No customer ever complained on our software which was fast and absurd realiable!
I think you had more chances to get hit by a meteorite than our software would
crash.
(the whole system had near 750 screens in Ur Forth, it was divide in aprox
5 larger files, the cad and graphics part to work with the gerber files and
isolation routines where the largest,at aprox. 450 screens)

[hughag...@gmail.com]

I totally agree with Charles Moore that Forth Inc. would not exist
without Elizabeth Rather and that she should be credited with the
success of Forth Inc..

I also think that Forth Inc. is a purely negative contribution
to the Forth community. Elizabeth Rather considers all Forthers
to be competition, and her goal is to destroy the Forth community.
Elizabeth Rather is a destroyer, not a creator.
Her goal was largely accomplished by ANS-Forth --- every Forther
who accepts ANS-Forth as the Standard is made to look like a retard,
and every Forther who opposes ANS-Forth is denounced for being
non-standard and nothing more than a cheap imitation and a wanna-bee.

Forth Inc.'s "success" is founded upon the destruction of everything
of value in Forth --- the Forth language will never be popular
so long as ANS-Forth is the standard --- Elizabeth Rather is
personally to blame for Forth's collapse in 1994.

Elizabeth Rather is totally lying when she claims to be a Forth
programmer, as she really doesn't know how to program in Forth.
All that remains now are a pack of liars gathered around
Elizabeth Rather, because birds of a feather flock together.
Anton Ertl and Bernd Paysan blatantly lied in their EuroForth paper:
------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, in classical Forth fashion, some users explored the idea
of what outer-locals accesses can be performed with minimal effort.
In particular, Usenet user “humptydumpty” introduced rquotations, a
simple quotation-like implementation that uses return-address manipulation.
The Forth system does not know about these rquotations and therefore
treats any locals accessed inside rquotations as if they were
accessed outside. In the case of Gforth (as currently implemented)
this works as long as the locals stack is not changed in the
meantime; e.g., the higher-order word that calls the rquotation
must not use locals. There is no easy way to see whether this restriction
has been met; this is also classical Forth style, but definitely not
user-friendly. Static analysis could be used to find out in many cases
whether the restriction has been met, but that would probably require
more effort than implementing the approach presented in this paper,
while not providing as much functionality.
------------------------------------------------------------

This is what you get when you have a cult founded by a liar.

[hughag...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 5:33:44 PM UTC-7, Peter Forth wrote:
> I would really like to know the opinion of people who knows
> or can guess why you think Forth was never teached widely
> in computer language curriculums, like Basic, C , Pascal,
> now Python etc...

How are you going to teach ANS-Forth when it is a mess of ambiguity
and blatant blunders? The goal, according to Elizabeth Rather, is:
"portable programmers, not portable programs."
ANS-Forth requires faith --- Phillipe Kahn was being overly generous
when he called it a "religion," because it is a cult.
ANS-Forth is not based upon computer science, or even common sense.

Of course, there are colleges teaching the Bible, and the Bible
doesn't really make any sense either --- the students just fake
being scholars with hand-waving and pseudo-intellectual blather.
There will always be fake scholars doing this, in any subject.

[dxforth]

On Monday, December 16, 2019 at 11:01:44 PM UTC+11, Mark Wills wrote:
> ...

> By the time of Kitt Peak, Forth the language was complete and
> completely recognisable as the language we know today.

While the manual for KP Forth has been preserved, sadly, the
sources appear to be lost to history. Not just that of course,
many forths.

[Gerry Jackson]

On 18/12/2019 05:40, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> Anton Ertl and Bernd Paysan blatantly lied in their EuroForth paper:
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Of course, in classical Forth fashion, some users explored the idea
> of what outer-locals accesses can be performed with minimal effort.
> In particular, Usenet user “humptydumpty” introduced rquotations, a
> simple quotation-like implementation that uses return-address manipulation.
> The Forth system does not know about these rquotations and therefore
> treats any locals accessed inside rquotations as if they were
> accessed outside. In the case of Gforth (as currently implemented)
> this works as long as the locals stack is not changed in the
> meantime; e.g., the higher-order word that calls the rquotation
> must not use locals. There is no easy way to see whether this restriction
> has been met; this is also classical Forth style, but definitely not
> user-friendly. Static analysis could be used to find out in many cases
> whether the restriction has been met, but that would probably require
> more effort than implementing the approach presented in this paper,
> while not providing as much functionality.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This is what you get when you have a cult founded by a liar.

Well they were writing about Humpty's rquotations not your extension.
Ignoring your work is understandable given that you threatened to sue
them when they previously used your name in a document.

Incidentally at the time did you consider sending a polite email to them
requesting that they update their paper to include your work. That's
what I did when they omitted to mention work I'd done and they re-issued
the paper. I suspect you didn't - you took it as an opportunity for a
rabid rant that you continue to bore the rest of us with ever since.

--
Gerry

[hughag...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 3:07:03 AM UTC-7, Gerry Jackson wrote:
> On 18/12/2019 05:40, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Anton Ertl and Bernd Paysan blatantly lied in their EuroForth paper:
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > Of course, in classical Forth fashion, some users explored the idea
> > of what outer-locals accesses can be performed with minimal effort.
> > In particular, Usenet user “humptydumpty” introduced rquotations, a
> > simple quotation-like implementation that uses return-address manipulation.
> > The Forth system does not know about these rquotations and therefore
> > treats any locals accessed inside rquotations as if they were
> > accessed outside. In the case of Gforth (as currently implemented)
> > this works as long as the locals stack is not changed in the
> > meantime; e.g., the higher-order word that calls the rquotation
> > must not use locals. There is no easy way to see whether this restriction
> > has been met; this is also classical Forth style, but definitely not
> > user-friendly. Static analysis could be used to find out in many cases
> > whether the restriction has been met, but that would probably require
> > more effort than implementing the approach presented in this paper,
> > while not providing as much functionality.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > This is what you get when you have a cult founded by a liar.
>
> Well they were writing about Humpty's rquotations not your extension.
> Ignoring your work is understandable given that you threatened to sue
> them when they previously used your name in a document.

Why did they feel obligated to write a EuroForth paper when they have
exactly nothing to offer? They could have just STFU --- they failed
to invent rquotations, so they have no obligation except to
hang their heads in shame and stop pretending to be Forth programmers.
Only a deep-dyed cult member would forgive them for their failure.

The Paysan-faked quotations are crap --- the Forth-200x committee are
obviously promoting this worthless "solution" on Stephen Pelc's orders.
The purpose of this exercise in deception is to allow Stephen Pelc
to later "invent" rquotations or something similar that actually works,
so he can sell it as proprietary VFX code.

Anton Ertl is the referee for the EuroForth papers --- that is why
he gets away with using EuroForth as a platform to attack my code
that actually works, and tell blatant lies about it.

Forth-200x is astro-turf --- this is a corporate marketing gimmick
that is faked up to appear to be a grass-roots effort.
Forth-200x has no purpose except to tie the Forth community to a
crap "Standard," to make VFX look relatively good so the Forth
community will buy VFX to obtain features that Stephen Pelc himself
explicitly banned from Forth-200x.

> Incidentally at the time did you consider sending a polite email to them
> requesting that they update their paper to include your work. That's
> what I did when they omitted to mention work I'd done and they re-issued
> the paper. I suspect you didn't - you took it as an opportunity for a
> rabid rant that you continue to bore the rest of us with ever since.

You expect me to get on my knees for the Forth-200x committee:
"Please don't lie about me!
Please squeeze out a tiny little compliment for your humble servant..."

That is absurd!
The Forth-200x committee didn't make a mistake, they were purposefully lying.
This is the way that cults operate --- they are liars --- they continue to
support their great leader even after his/her lies become grossly obvious.
A cult leader typically starts out by telling a white lie, such as
when Elizabeth Rather claimed to be a Forth programmer, and the cult
accepts this because they can't be in the cult if they don't and it seems
to be harmless --- the lies just get bigger and bigger though --- the cult
continues to swallow these ever-greater whoppers because to do otherwise
would require them to admit that they had been wrong from the start.
Stephen Pelc is the natural second-step from Elizabeth Rather, as he is
a big liar too --- he insulted me by saying that anybody can write a
better string-stack than I can, including an anonymous African 30 years ago ---
the cult dutifully accepts this despite the fact that he has nothing to
show and there is no evidence to indicate that he knows what copy-on-write is.

Stephen Pelc insulted me by saying that my disambiguifiers don't work:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.forth/T-yYkpVwYew

On Tuesday, August 1, 2017 at 2:27:41 AM UTC-7, Stephen Pelc wrote:
> Hugh's wonderful disambiguifiers do NOT do what the great Hugh thinks
> they do. What the great Hugh has done is to redefine a large number of
> words so that they behave in a very restricted way to support the
> great Hugh's version of Forth. Hugh's SYNONYM is not portable ANS
> Forth unless you use Hugh's Forth. Bah, humbug. Another emperor
> with no clothes.
>
> Stephen

Anton Ertl and Alex McDonald are liars too, because they presented
the bizarre idea that the disambiguifiers have the magical ability
to allow words like IF R@ etc. to work inside of [ ... ] brackets.
You're a liar too because you supported this blatant lie with a
hand-waving argument that only a deep-dyed cult member would accept:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.forth/y96tQf_iOSk%5B1-25%5D
This was not the truth, part of the truth, or anything like the truth.

ANS-Forth and Forth-200x are a cult --- you all are a pack of liars.
This is why ANS-Forth and Forth-200x can't be taught in college.

On Monday, December 16, 2019 at 5:01:44 AM UTC-7, Mark Wills wrote:
> Charles told
> me to my face at EuroForth in 2018 that without Elizabeth, Forth Inc.

> would not exist ... He credits the success of Forth Inc. to Elizabeth.

Forth Inc. is just like every corporation.
They divide humanity into 5 groups:
1.) customers who give them money (yay!)
2.) competition who must be defeated for the corporation to survive (boo!)
3.) employees who take their money but hopefully give them a product to sell
4.) cult members who work for free, giving them a product to sell
5.) the government who takes people's money and gives them nothing

Which group are you in?
Does #4 seem familiar? Is this you?
Why did you write that regular-expression package except to help
MPE sell VFX? Did Stephen Pelc pat you on the head like a good doggy?

[dxforth]

On Thursday, December 19, 2019 at 2:54:03 PM UTC+11, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 3:07:03 AM UTC-7, Gerry Jackson wrote:
> > On 18/12/2019 05:40, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:

> > ...

> > > This is what you get when you have a cult founded by a liar.
> >
> > Well they were writing about Humpty's rquotations not your extension.
> > Ignoring your work is understandable given that you threatened to sue
> > them when they previously used your name in a document.
>
> Why did they feel obligated to write a EuroForth paper when they have
> exactly nothing to offer?

What they offer is an opinion which you can accept or reject. EuroForth
papers have no more authority than FORML papers that preceded them.
That the authors are 200x members is simply another choice.

> 5.) the government who takes people's money and gives them nothing

Now that is worthy of everybody's attention since there is no opting
out of society.

[hughag...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 9:42:04 PM UTC-7, dxforth wrote:
> On Thursday, December 19, 2019 at 2:54:03 PM UTC+11, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 3:07:03 AM UTC-7, Gerry Jackson wrote:
> > > On 18/12/2019 05:40, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > ...
> > > > This is what you get when you have a cult founded by a liar.
> > >
> > > Well they were writing about Humpty's rquotations not your extension.
> > > Ignoring your work is understandable given that you threatened to sue
> > > them when they previously used your name in a document.
> >
> > Why did they feel obligated to write a EuroForth paper when they have
> > exactly nothing to offer?
>
> What they offer is an opinion which you can accept or reject. EuroForth
> papers have no more authority than FORML papers that preceded them.
> That the authors are 200x members is simply another choice.

Well, lets read what Anton Ertl has to say about himself:
http://www.euroforth.org/ef19/cfp.html
-------------------------------------
Refereed papers will be reviewed by experts against criteria for
scientific papers, such as originality and technical quality, and then
will be accepted to or rejected from the academic stream.
-------------------------------------
Anton Ertl is the referee, so he is expressing a pretty high opinion
of himself --- he believes that he knows everything there is to know
about Forth and hence can look down his nose at the wanna-bee Forthers
to judge their originality and technical quality.

Then Anton Ertl and Bernd Paysan write a paper that has no purpose
except to attack the rquotations with blatant lies.

Why did they feel obligated to write a EuroForth paper when they have

exactly nothing to offer? Obviously Stephen Pelc ordered them to
attack the rquotations, and he ordered them to lie.

I think this totally discredits EuroForth --- it is nothing more
than a platform for MPE to attack Forth programmers who write
Forth code that works.

Anton Ertl and Bernd Paysan are failures as Forth programmers
as they have not written any working code, except the Paysan-faked
quotations that are just syntactic sugar for :NONAME .
Their paper consisted of them pretending to be experts on various
techniques that they read about somebody else implementing.
I already discussed their lack of originality:

On Sunday, June 23, 2019 at 7:10:13 AM UTC-7, Ilya Tarasov wrote:
> воскресенье, 23 июня 2019 г., 16:09:58 UTC+3 пользователь hughag...@gmail.com написал:
> > On Sunday, June 23, 2019 at 4:45:12 AM UTC-7, Ilya Tarasov wrote:
> > > Quotations may be useful, but it depends on implementation.
> >
> > Have you read the EuroForth-2018 paper from Anton Ertl and Bernd Paysan?
> > http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/euroforth/ef18/papers/ertl.pdf
> >
> > This says:
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Explicit management of writable locals:
> > For writable locals, we usually do not want separately modifyable copies,
> > but want to access one home location. In our approach, home locations
> > are allocated (and memory managed) explicitly (with align here swap ,
> > in the bar example). The addresses of these home locations are read-only
> > and copied into the closures, like other read-only values.
> > The home locations are accessed with memory words, such as @ and !,
> > as shown in the bar example. This approach is called assignment conversion.
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Does this scheme seem familiar to you?
> > They stole this scheme from your Quark Forth.
>
> Oh, let they be happy with this! :)

[dxforth]

On Monday, December 23, 2019 at 11:23:31 AM UTC+11, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 9:42:04 PM UTC-7, dxforth wrote:
> > On Thursday, December 19, 2019 at 2:54:03 PM UTC+11, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 3:07:03 AM UTC-7, Gerry Jackson wrote:
> > > > On 18/12/2019 05:40, hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > ...
> > > > > This is what you get when you have a cult founded by a liar.
> > > >
> > > > Well they were writing about Humpty's rquotations not your extension.
> > > > Ignoring your work is understandable given that you threatened to sue
> > > > them when they previously used your name in a document.
> > >
> > > Why did they feel obligated to write a EuroForth paper when they have
> > > exactly nothing to offer?
> >
> > What they offer is an opinion which you can accept or reject. EuroForth
> > papers have no more authority than FORML papers that preceded them.
> > That the authors are 200x members is simply another choice.
>
> Well, lets read what Anton Ertl has to say about himself:
> http://www.euroforth.org/ef19/cfp.html
> -------------------------------------
> Refereed papers will be reviewed by experts against criteria for
> scientific papers, such as originality and technical quality, and then
> will be accepted to or rejected from the academic stream.
> -------------------------------------

And where is the ANS committee today that so many aspire to step
into their shoes?