Re: History of CREATE...DOES> ?

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

There's a detailed description of the origins of these in Chuck's
address "FORTH: The Last Ten Years ..." (FD V1N6. p72).

Thanks.  So Forth, Inc. did have CREATE..DOES> by 1980 (when this
article was published).  My family tree says about polyForth:

\I FORTH, Inc.'s PC offering
\U http://www.forth.com/resources/evolution/evolve_3.html#3.2
1982 Implementation polyFORTH
miniFORTH begot polyFORTH        \ FORTH, Inc., approx. 1980

Not sure where I have the 1982 and 1980 numbers from.  According to
"The Evolution of Forth", the first edition of Starting Forth (1981)
was mostly written for polyForth, so the 1980 number looks more
plausible now.

So maybe this new CREATE..DOES> first appeared in polyForth, or maybe
in later versions of miniForth.

But CREATE...DOES> also made it into Forth-79, so it must have been
more widespread by then.  In particular, Chuck Moore's description in
the article above does not seem clear enough to me for developing
something compatible independently, if you start with fig-Forth (where
CREATE was best fit as a factor of CODE, not VARIABLE).  Of course,
once you know how CREATE and DOES> are defined in Forth-79, working
out an implementation is not that difficult, but how come they were
defined in Forth-79 in that way?

They all came from Forth Inc but mostly not Chuck.  He needed help!

I am not sure whether he needed it, but he certainly got it.  The name
I read again and again is Dean Sanderson, wo seems to have had quite a
lot of influence on the evolution of Forth.

There is an ariticle about RISC-V which identifies what instruction
comes from where.  As a complement to the family tree, it would be
great if someone documented the history of certain words and features
of Forth.  But who would do that?

BTW, my family tree contains Elizabeth Rather's verdict about
Forth-79:

\ from Elizabeth Rather
\  As far as standards conformance is concerned, Forth-79 was such an
\  incomplete and contradictory "standard" that I doubt anyone can fully claim
\  conformance to it.  polyFORTH was very close to Forth-83, and had an
\  optional compatibility suite for the non-conforming bits.  This unhappy
\  state of affairs came about because Forth-83 was done in two meetings; the
\  design of pF was finalized between the first and second, and conformed to
\  all the "firm decisions" taken in the first meeting.  But some of those were
\  reversed in the 2nd meeting, and that created too many incompatibilities for
\  us to follow.  SwiftForth conforms to ANS Forth.

Ok, that explains the 1982 date given above.  But OTOH Elizabeth
Rather was a co-author of "The Evolution of Forth", which claims that
Starting Forth was mostly written for polyForth.

I see in https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102640347
that the "polyForth II -- Reference manual" is from 1982, so maybe
that explains it: polyForth in 1980, polyForth II compatible with the
first draft of Forth-83 from 1982.

In any case, the question remains how CREATE..DOES> came into
Forth-79.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
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