Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 18:49:37 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, Andrzej Bialecki <abial@nask.pl>, Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@auss2.alcatel.com.au> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: lisp vs. Forth Message-ID: <4.1.19981104184626.0426cd10@127.0.0.1> In-Reply-To: <19981105120934.X784@freebie.lemis.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9811041217350.9870-100000@korin.warman.org.pl> <98Nov4.211907est.40336@border.alcanet.com.au> <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9811041217350.9870-100000@korin.warman.org.pl>
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The troublesome thing about Forth, though, is that of all languages it involves the largest number of entities that are not named. You just have "the thing on the top of the stack," And "the thing that's below it on the stack," etc. This leads to code that's incredibly hard to figure out. Even for the author. --Brett At 12:09 PM 11/5/98 +1030, Greg Lehey wrote: >[respecting jkh's implicit wishes and following up to -chat] > >On Wednesday, 4 November 1998 at 12:20:31 +0100, Andrzej Bialecki wrote: >> On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Peter Jeremy wrote: >> >>> I prefer lisp for non-trivial work, but can get by in forth. You >>> can write illegible code in any language, so I don't think that >>> argument holds much weight. A forth kernel is much smaller than >>> lisp because there's no need for garbage collection or tagged pointers. >>> (The downside is that forth doesn't have garbage collection or >>> runtime typing :-). >> >> ...and some people consider it an advantage of Forth :-). You simply >> fetch/put an N-bit value, and _you_ should know what it means. > >This somewhat limits what it's *allowed* to mean, unfortunately. > >Greg >-- >See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers >finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org >with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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