Re: quotations

On 9/02/2025 6:41 pm, Paul Rubin wrote:

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

quotations ... strike me as being wrong in every way, not least
because they are intended to feature prominently, stuffed in one's
face.  I don't understand the appeal at all.

 
I never got the impression they were supposed to be so prominent, though
I guess one could program in a style that uses them heavily.

IMO it does nothing for readability to see a definition interrupted by another.
My reaction is one of WTF.

My first
Forth program used a lot of XT's but in retrospect, it was rather
unidiomatic.
 
The following sort of follows an idiom for Python GUI programs.  You
have a function MAKE-BUTTON that puts a button on the screen.  The
button has a label, and it calls a function when you press it.  This
is using the notation from Anton's post but I haven't tested it.
 
   : make-button ( a u xt -- ) ... ;
       \ a u is the label, xt is the action
 
Now you want to draw buttons for a numeric keypad:
 
   : make-action ( n -- xt ) [n:d ." You pressed " . ] ;
   : make-label ( n -- a u )  \ make a string like "5" in the dictionary
        here { a } 1 chars allot  '0' + a c! a 1 ;
 
   : keypad ( -- ) 10 0 do
                      i make-label i make-action make-button
                   loop ;
 
Now there will be buttons labelled "0", "1", ... "9", and and when you
press one, it will print "you pressed 5" or whatever for that button.
 
I think the idiomatic old-school Forth alternative to this would be an
OOP-like approach, but the above is probably more concise, and to some
of us more intuitive.

I don't understand make-action at all.  What is it meant to be doing?
Call me boring but I don't like inventing new syntax only to have to
re-learn what it does when I have to come back and maintain it.  Not
sure if it applies to yours but ANS A.6.2.0455 gives an example of a table
of code fragments using :NONAME.  IMO such instances are rare enough to
not require sugar-coating.  I'm aware of quotations being used in DOES>
code, words having multiple xt's etc but to me this is the antithesis of
Forth - the opposite of being simple.