HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: 1992 Developers Competition
From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Date: 18 Aug 92 11:49:16 GMT
Organization: EIEI-U

[I don't know why this ended up as two separate messages...  -dwp]
Category 5,  Topic 14
Message 2         Tue Aug 18, 1992
E.RATHER [Elizabeth]         at 01:05 EDT
 
1992 Developers Competition 120 S/W developers from all over the world will
travel to North Carolina on Oct. 9-10 to compete for cash & software prizes:

  $10,000 in cash prizes
  $150,000 in software/hardware prizes
  100 competitors representing more than 50 different products
  Broad industry and geographic participation

Sponsored by Artful Applications, SofDesign Int l, Data Based Advisor,  MDBS,
DataEAse Int l, Sinc, Softsystems, Zachary Software, dLESKO,  Concentric Data
Systems, Black & White, Proworks, Borland, Evolution  Trading, Burton Systems
Software, Microrim, Clarion, Knowledge  Information Systems, Matesys, Slawson
Communications, Icarus, Blink,  Soft.Letter, Symbiotic, Rowe Software,
Nantucket and Microsoft.

Competing:  More than 50 teams, incl. teams using:  Clipper (14),  Advanced
Revelation (4), C (3), Cobol (2), OMNIS (2), FilePro (2),  KnowledgMan,
FoxPro, Advanced dbMASTER, Oracle, 4th Dimension,  Basic 2.0, DataEase,
Paradox, dBASE IV, EZBASE, R:BASE, Cloarion,  MAGIC, GenSys 2, Blinker,
Funcky, NetLib, Zachary, GRID, Artful Lib,  BecknerLib, AllClip, Tlink, UI2
and more.

Concurrent On-Line competition on CompuServ:  next best thing to being  there!

For more information, download DCMP92.ZIP from CompuServ DBA  forum, Library
1.  It contains the proceedings from the 1991 competition,  rules, last year s
competition, and everything else.

Call 919-383-9749 now if you want to compete.

1991 Developers Competition 1816 Front St., Suite 130 Durham, NC  27705
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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: What should the Standard include?
Date: 14 Aug 92 12:19:10 GMT
Organization: EIEI-U

Category 10,  Topic 30
Message 241       Thu Aug 13, 1992
B.RODRIGUEZ2 [Brad]          at 18:56 EDT
 
Pardon me, Doug: I should have said that "some legitimate, valid, and portable
applications are disallowed under ANS Forth."  Or perhaps I should say
"potentially portable."  Thanks for pointing this out.

Brad Rodriguez
 B.RODRIGUEZ2 on GEnie   |   bradford@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca
 "All this is meaningless drivel if no one calls the client!"
                                                - Chris McEwen


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From: nick@sw.stratus.com (Nicolas Tamburri)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Free Forth
Date: 12 Aug 92 14:16:15 GMT
Organization: Stratus Computer, Inc.

Charles Eaker writes:
>   I agree with Elizabeth Rather: no other language has been hobbled
>   as badly as Forth by the proliferation of unprofessional (but free)
>   implementations. Even BASIC survived its free implementation period
>   better than Forth did. The *really* successful languages never went
>   through a free implementation period.

I don't know if I agree with this or not.  Yes, there are a lot of bad
free "Forths" out there, (I'd really prefer the term TIL for many of them)
but can anyone really argue that the availability of the free figFORTH has
hurt Forth's popularity.  I for one would never have even tried Forth
had it not been for figFORTH.  I wonder how many others are in the
same boat.

More importantly, figFORTH was a springboard for supported Forths.  My second
Forth was a souped up figFORTH with support for an Atari 800.  I paid money
for it, because the free figFORTH whet my appetite.  Similarly, Mitch
Bradley's Forthmacs acknowledges its Laxen&Perry FORTH83 heritage, although
he provides enough extras to make it worth the money.

So, yes of course, professional systems are generally better than free
versions.  But to say that F-PC is a bad Forth because of its price, or
Yerk/Mops gives Forth a bad name because you are no longer required to
pay for it is to do those systems and their developers an injustice.
Likewise to say that the availability of those versions hurts Forth in
general is to ignore reality.

There is one area where I can agree and it's an old point:  The time
that has been spent reinventing all these various versions which have
little differences in functionality and large differences in compatability
could have been much better spent writing utilities and applications
for existing platforms which make developing Forth programs easier, and
taking away some of Forth's austerity.  IMO this turns people off to
Forth a lot more than its RPN notation.

							/nt
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
From: dak@messua.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (David Kastrup)
Subject: Borlands start. Was An Open ANSI Forth Implementation
Organization: Rechnerbetrieb Informatik  /  RWTH Aachen
Date: 18 Aug 92 16:13:19 GMT

ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie) writes:

>Category 10,  Topic 41
>Message 57        Tue Aug 18, 1992
>E.RATHER [Elizabeth]         at 01:25 EDT
> 
>RE the several people who pointed out that Borland wasn't big & famous when
>they introduced Turbo Pascal:  no, but Pascal was very widely known, as it had
>been kicking around CS depts. for years, was developed by a widely respected
>guru, and had already received a lot of notice. Borland's genius was in
>hopping on a bandwagon and doing it right.  They didn't create the bandwagon.

I believe they did not even develop the first version (under CP/M) in
the first place, although I might be mistaken. I had on my Nascom II
(historic Z80-mill) something called Blue Label Pascal from some firm
in Scandinavia. It had the same bug in the modulo routine
(-2 mod 4 = 2, -6 mod 4 = -2) as the infamous Turbo Pascal 1.0
for CP/M. And the compile/edit/run-Environment was there in BLS
too, although their local variable support used stacks instead of
static variables moved to/from stacks.

So I suppose (unless Borland is just another name) that the first
version of Turbo was based on a bought source.
From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Forth Taught at Schools/Universities
Date: 12 Aug 92 11:50:27 GMT
Organization: EIEI-U

Category 2,  Topic 2
Message 118       Wed Aug 12, 1992
E.RATHER [Elizabeth]         at 00:18 EDT
 
RE categorizing stuff: CATCH and THROW have been used by Mitch Bradley and (I
think) John Hayes and others I can't name at this point.

ENVIRONMENT? was requested by a number of users and programmers, sufficiently
strongly that we made an effort to satisfy their request.  Brad's point is
that this is invented technology, and I agree that this is one example of
that.  There aren't many.

ALLOCATE and FREE, again, came from Bradley in particular, and I believe
Martin Tracy cited at least a couple of others doing similar things.  Possibly
Ray Duncan?  It's been several years.

Both data structures and multitasking clearly fall into the category of things
that a number of implementors support (many, in the case of multitasking) but
the implementations differ so much that we failed to come up with acceptable
solutions.  We tried very hard in the case of multitasking, less so for data
structures (largely because people felt this was a very new and dynamic area
that would benefit from being allowed to mature a little further).
-----
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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Sound
Date: 22 Aug 92 13:27:39 GMT
Organization: EIEI-U

Category 18,  Topic 6
Message 1         Sat Aug 22, 1992
B.DUNN5 [Brian]              at 05:19 EDT
 
After a while, 7 EMIT gets a bit dull.  Most machines are able to generate
some kind of sound.  A least common denominator is a generic tone of some
frequency.  One problem is that some computers must wait while generating this
tone ( an old Apple ][+, say ) while others are able to go their own way while
the tone is being generated.  Then, some are able to generate a tone for a
certain amount of time and will automatically stop later. Others must be told
to stop.

HERTZ  ( Hz -- )  Start creating a tone of the given frequency.
  Only one tone at a time is active, the previous is immediatly stopped.
  A parameter of 0 causes silence.

 -or-

SOUND  ( Hz  milliseconds  -- )  Generate a tone for some amount of time.

Since most machines are able to generate several tones at once, perhaps:

SOUND  ( Hz  voice  milliseconds  -- )  Generate using the given hardware
voice for the given number of milliseconds.


It seems that  SOUND ( Hz voice -- ) would allow easy flexibility under many
platforms.

The number of voices available would be system dependent, and unavailable
voices would be ignored.

Ideas?
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From: murphyg@Software.Mitel.COM (Gary Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: An Open ANSI Forth Implementation
Date: 14 Aug 92 13:04:54 GMT
	<7858012@harvee.billerica.ma.us>
Organization: Applications Software II, MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario,
	Canada
In-reply-to: esj@harvee.billerica.ma.us's message of 13 Aug 92 06:16:38 GMT

In article <7858012@harvee.billerica.ma.us> esj@harvee.billerica.ma.us (Eric S Johansson) writes:

   In article <3980.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us> ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us
   (ForthNet articles from GEnie) writes:
   > Regarding Bevan's point about Borland, AT&T et al "seeding the market" with
   > free software...please note that these are both large, wealthy and prestigious
   > organizations.  They can afford to develop a highly polished system and give
   > it away in volume, and their offering will receive respect and interest

   I can't speak for borland but when  at&t c++ (cfront) first came out it was a
   total Piece Of C**p that competed with free forths for the worst
   compiler implementation of the year award.  on top of that you had to
   pay 2000$ for a source license for the privilage.  Cfront retained its
   POC nature well past its 2.0 release which was the last one I used.

I started using Borland's TurboPascal with the first shipments of
version 1.0.  Borland was NOT, at that time, a big, famous, prestigious
company.  All they had was the guts to sell a decent (small-model only)
compiler with the very first 'Application Development Environment' for
the ridiculous price of $69 (more if you wanted the source, the same was
true of the first TurboC library), donated many man-hours to developing
useful sample code for BBS distribution, had their staff write
instructive articles for the programmer's magazines (and more source to
give away), and wagered a bundle on full page ads in international
magazines.  What you see as Borland today is a direct result of that
gamble.

--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - Gary.Murphy@software.mitel.COM - (613) 592-2122 x3709
                     Where do purposes come from?
From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: ANS TC Magnet for ROMability
Date: 22 Aug 92 13:26:55 GMT
Organization: EIEI-U

Category 10,  Topic 22
Message 74        Fri Aug 21, 1992
B.RODRIGUEZ2 [Brad]          at 22:36 EDT
 
O.K., I now have sent in three proposals and a request for clarification on
the subject of cross-compilers.  I'm posting them to the Forthnet to prompt
some open discussion of the issues they raise, and the suitability of the
proposed solutions.  Fire when ready, Gridley.

Brad Rodriguez
 B.RODRIGUEZ2 on GEnie   |   bradford@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca
 So many projects....so little time.

-----
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From: mikeh@starnine.com (Mike Haas)
Subject: Re: Free Forth
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 06:45:16 GMT
Organization: StarNine Technologies, Inc.

In article <1992Aug10.152749.26742@crd.ge.com> eaker@ukulele.crd.ge.com writes:
>In article <BEVAN.92Aug8212328@jaguar.cs.man.ac.uk>, bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) writes:
>|> |> In article <1992Aug7.195802.24321@crd.ge.com> eaker@ukulele.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Charles E Eaker) writes:
>|>    I agree with Elizabeth Rather: no other language has been hobbled
>|>    as badly as Forth by the proliferation of unprofessional (but free)
>|>    implementations. Even BASIC survived its free implementation period
>|> 
>|> So I guess C and C++ aren't *really* successful?  (Remember a C
>|> compiler used to come _free_ with UNIX, which was also _free_ for
>|> universities)
>
>By "free implementation period" I meant a period of time when implementations
>of subsets of the language were produced by non-professionals and widely
>distributed.

The relative complexity of every other type of compiler when compared
with Forth has undoubtedly given them some insurance from
proliferations of free, less-than optimum implementations.

Take C, for instance.  Anyone who would produce a C that only
read source from screens, was not capable of producing object files,
did not support structs, forward-referencing or data-typing
would be laughable at best.

Forth is at its best in imbedded systems and other specialized
applications and it's limitations as a general purpose language
are quite acceptable in those areas.  To say that Forth's lack of
general appeal is largely due to the pd implementations is not
accurate IMHO.

For the Forth community, they have had an overall positive role, as
they have provided alternatives and helped establish new ideas.

For the general computing community, they have played an overall
negative role, as their minimal implementations, being so readily
available, are often the only examples  at hand.

I've often thought that perhaps Forth should establish two
standards.  One for imbedded systems development (the conventional
implementations serve well here), and another for general
computing development.  Requirements for the latter would include
file and memory interfaces capable of mapping onto the various
OS's we've come to know & love (& hate).  It would not be
unthinkable that an object-file interface bve defined for this
genre either... supporting both importation and exportation.

It seems there is division among the forth community along
these lines and much of the confusion of standards definition
might evaporate.

Of course, this is all pie-in-the-sky, but I do feel that
Forth is being tugged in many directions.

Hmmm... FIFTH has already been taken, and SIXTH is too hard to say.
Maybe FORTH & INCHES?
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
From: xtifr@netcom.com (Chris Waters)
Subject: Re: ANS TC Magnet for ROMability
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 22:18:41 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 

In <4002.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us> ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie) writes:

>Category 10,  Topic 22
>Message 78        Fri Aug 21, 1992
>B.RODRIGUEZ2 [Brad]          at 22:52 EDT
> 
>                 ANSI X3J14 FORTH TECHNICAL PROPOSAL
>                     (X3J14 dpANS-3, March 1992)

>TITLE:  New category: ANS Forth Translator

Oops, in my previous post, I misinterpreted what Brad was proposing,
because I hadn't read his subsequent posts.  I like this idea, but my
gut reaction is: not now.  The standard, *as it sits* is already
controversial, and adding a whole new idea, like a "standard translator"
will simply open up whole new areas of complexity and controversy.

>          A programming language processor conforms to this
>          Standard and may be labeled an 'ANS Forth Translator'
>          if it is capable of compiling, but not executing, in

This section is what I have the most problem with.  EVERY cross-compiler
I've seen DOES allow you to define and execute words in the host system.
Better (as I mentioned in my previous post) to codify and standardize
the types of things that are done in cross-compilers, and create a
standard that will WORK for both cross-compilers and standard Forth
systems.  Which would be, I suspect, a MAJOR undertaking, which might
delay the completion of the standard for years.

Brad's proposal here seems FAR too limiting--better to have no standards
in this area than to have a bad one.

In another post, he did mention some possible clarifications to the
standard about the ability to execute newly defined words and such.  That
proposal does seem reasonable.
-- 
Chris Waters    | the insane don't | NOBODY for President!
xtifr@netcom.COM| need disclaimers | Because Nobody's perfect!!
Newsgroups: comp.lang.visual,comp.graphics,comp.multimedia,comp.human-factors
From: tanimoto@cs.washington.edu (Steve Tanimoto)
Subject: Housing at VL'92
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 92 18:44:20 GMT


Housing update for VL'92, Sept. 15-18, 1992, Seattle, WA.

Although the Meany Towers Hotel is now booked full during the
Visual Languages Workshop, rooms are still available in the
vicinity at conference rates:

University Plaza Hotel
(for reservations call 206-634-0100)
 singles: $65/night,  doubles: $70/night

University of Washington Housing Services
(for reservations ask Kay Beck to send you a housing form:
  send your name and postal address to kbeck@cs.washington.edu)
singles (for all three nights, Sept 15, 16, 17): $80.41 = 26.80/night
doubles (for all three nights...): $57.91/night/person.
  stays may be extended by one night in either direction at the
  same rate.


For further information on the workshop contact either:
Kay Beck at kbeck@cs.washington.edu  or
Steve Tanimoto at tanimoto@cs.washington.edu

-------------------------------------------------
VL92: The IEEE Int'l Workshop on Visual Languages
September 15-18, 1992,        Seattle, Washington
-------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.lang.visual
From: maskull@cix.compulink.co.uk (Nerdware Professionals)
Subject: VL books
Reply-To: maskull@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 21:34:32 +0000

My current interest is VL, but I'm find it hard to locate any useful
information.

Can anyone please advise me on which books to look for.

TIA, Martin
Xref: sparky comp.lang.visual:145 comp.human-factors:1833
From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.visual,comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: Tutorials at VL'92
Date: 21 Aug 92 18:31:09 GMT
Article-I.D.: u.1992Aug21.183109.18728
Organization: WORLDESIGN, Seattle



Can we get some more information on the forthcoming Visual Languages
conference in Seattle?  This is the first I've heard of it.

Bob
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
From: mbk@lyapunov.ucsd.edu (Matt Kennel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Small Language Wanted
Date: 21 Aug 1992 21:08:09 GMT
Organization: Institute For Nonlinear Science, UCSD
NNTP-Posting-Host: lyapunov.ucsd.edu
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL3

mdchaney@fractal.ucs.indiana.edu (M Darrin Chaney) writes:
: Not to fan a flame war, but indeed C++ is _excellent_ for working with
: complex numbers, etc.  And, nobody will accuse you of using an outdated
: language.

C++:  complex A, B, C;

C = A + B

{ get A and B, call "+" operator.  Create new temporary structure for
  result by calling complex constructor.  Run "+" operator. 
  call overloaded "=" operator.  Copy into C. Delete temporary.}

And can C++ optimize

for (i=1; i<1000; i++) {
	<junk not altering A and B>
	C = A + B
	<more junk not altering A and B>
	func(C)
}

by taking out C=A+B as a loop invariant?

How can it if the "+" and "=" operators could conceivably do *ANYTHING*
which might possibly alter something else somewhere else.

With enough effort no doubt, this problem could be fixed to make
code that's not much worse than Fortran-IV.  (The point is that
the algebra of complex numbers and matrices and vector operations restricts
what can happen allowing more optimization.)

In case you're wondering, yes I think that OO programming can be a
good thing, even in scientific programs, but I also believe that the
"textbook examples" of classes, i.e. complex numbers and vectors and
matrices are *too important* to do without special treatment.  If it were
possible to do these right, and still as special cases of a fully general
notion, great, but that's not here today.

: C is an excellent language for scientific stuff, and C++ even better.

Personally, I think C is an excellent language for writing Unix
utilities, and barely tolerable for scientific programs, useful only because
Fortran 77 doesn't have dynamically allocatable memory and structures.
I think that C++ really sucks. (Modula-3 and Eiffel perform that function
better, I think).

: 
: Check out the flame-war du jour in soc.college for more information on
: how Scheme "is great|sucks" compared to C which "is great|sucks".

sorry, I should contain myself....


: 	Darrin
: -- 

--
-Matt Kennel  		mbk@inls1.ucsd.edu
-Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego
-*** AD: Archive for nonlinear dynamics papers & programs: FTP to
-***     lyapunov.ucsd.edu, username "anonymous".
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc