Re: Why dial-a-standard is not a thing in Forth

On 18 Apr 25 at group /comp/lang/forth in article 2025Apr18.082817@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
<anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>  (anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at)  wrote:

That's much like setting the radix.

BASE is one of the misfeatures of Forth, and demonstrates the
disadvantage of having a state for the rest of the text
interpretation, and the Chuck Moore approach to .  Do you start every
file with DECIMAL or HEX?  Looking at SwiftForth (where one might
expect the most Chuck Moore influence), I see 26 occurences of DECIMAL
and 16 occurences of HEX, and usually not before the first occurence
of an integer with several digits.  As an example, the file that
contains the definition

: DECIMAL ( -- )   10 BASE ! ;

does not contain an invocation of DECIMAL before this use of "10".

So - why couldn't this work?

As mentioned, there is no [FORTH2012] and no [ANSFORTH].

Moreover, this general approach does not work for BASE: If the next
standard required that systems start out in, say, octal, I am sure
that a lot of the existing source files would fail unless you invoked
DECIMAL before the INCLUDE.  BASE only works (and only so-so) because
every sane system defaults to DECIMAL, and that does not change
between standard versions.

In all of my applications $0A BASE ! is one of the 1st words, because of 
the DECIMAL issue. and ICECOLD and COLD also set it to $0A

Also all my developed HW (w/ and w/ FORTH) I made a 0,1uf || 100k from GND 
to PE and spent a good PWRup/BROWNout chip.

and my ICECOLD sets the RAM all regs of CPU and peripheral to the default 
state or 0 if there is none.

So all my aps start with a defined state of all regs, vars...

Covered my ass very good for nearly 60 yrs of working!

YMMV and masochists don't do it :)





Saludos (an alle Vernünftigen, Rest sh. sig)
Wolfgang

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