Re: single-xt approach in the standard

peter.m.falth@gmail.com (PMF) writes:

In my opinion the Forth standard should not care about implementation
details like how a header is organized ( single, dual xt or some other
way).

It does not.  SwiftForth could implement a standard-conforming FILE S"
without changing the header structure.

Looking back at the standard, in my opinion it was a mistake to
standardize the nt!  It would have been better to have
FIND-INTERPRET  instead of FIND-NAME NAME>INTERPRET  and
FIND-COMPILE  instead of FIND-NAME NAME>COMPILE.

And FIND-INTERPRET-IN and FIND-COMPILE-IN.  What about
TRAVERSE-WORDLIST?  Would you then have TRAVERSE-WORDLIST-INTERPRET
and TRAVERSE-WORDLIST-COMPILE?  If so, how should MWORDS
<http://theforth.net/package/mwords> behave?

That would have given more freedom to organize the internal header
structure.

OTOH, the nt turns named words into a first-class concept that has its
own handle, enabling words like TRAVERSE-WORDLIST and allowing
programmers to write words like MWORDS.

Very few system implementors use several headers per word (making the
nt hard to implement), and none of these systems is widely used (have
they been published at all)?

And standardizing the nt has not taken away this freedom.  The nt and
all the words that deal with it are in TOOLS EXT and therefore optional.

So you are not asking for freedom to organize the internal header
structure in a standard system, but you are begrudging the programmers
the freedom to write programs like MWORDS as a standard program
requiring several words from the Programming-Tools Extensions word
set.

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