Re: "The Best Programming Language for the End of the World"

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

On the topic of documentation Forth Standard (the document to which
everyone looks) hasn't clarified aspects of REPRESENT F. etc.

The document does not write itself.  If you think that something is
unclear, you can make a request for clarification on
<https://forth-standard.org/> (when it runs again, hopefully soon).
If you think that some text should be changed in a specific way, you
can make a proposal for that.  If you have no interest in doing that
for these topics (which seem to be important enough to mention them
here), why should anybody else have an interest in doing that?

That holes still exist after 30 years can only mean forthers are
content with less than perfect documentation.  No?

In the case of "F.", I actually believe that most users would prefer
something that produces an output, possibly in scientific
representation, of up to 20 characters over the exact implementation
of the specification that is implemented by Gforth and VFX:

1e200 f. 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.  ok
1e-200 f. 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001  ok

But nobody has written a proposal for changing "F." in that way.  The
feedback on such a proposal would indicate whether my belief is
correct or not.  The absence of such a proposal indicates that the
topic is not important enough for Forth programmers and implementors.

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