Re: gEDA-user: interesting links

[Dave McGuire <mcguire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<foghorn leghorn>
   It was a joke, son...I say, a JOKE! ;)
</foghorn leghorn>

On Aug 30, 2007, at 1:29 AM, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
>>    FORTH FORTH FORTH!!
>
> Forth lacks a consistent library mechanism, and for that matter,
> consistency across implementations.  ANSI Forth compilers addressed
> the latter issue, but GForth is still *the* Forth environment to use
> if you want full ANSI compliance.  No other Forth compares.
>
> However, as a person who is fluent in both Forth and Haskell, I have
> to cast my vote for OCaml or Haskell.  Forth is a VERY capable
> language, but because it's a programmer amplifier of unprecedented
> degree, you can believe that the code base will be rendered
> inscrutible almost as soon as people start to contribute back to the
> code base.  This is particularly true as programmers today are more
> familiar with record-based abstract data types, rather than
> array-based ADTs (think row-major storage versus column-major
> storage), and this lack of experience will inevitably lead to horrible
> code.  Unless, that is, you want to institute a strict policy of code
> reviews (and a corresponding coding conventions guideline document to
> back the review approval process) before CLs are accepted.  Ahh, but
> now you run the risk of politicizing the CL approval process, which
> might be a big turn-off to new submitters.
>
> Additionally, OCaml and Haskell have quite a bit more foreign function
> interfaces than Forth does.  GForth supports FFI through the ffcall
> library, which is nice, but you'll be re-inventing the wheel for
> things like GTK and so forth (again, this boils down to lack of
> portable library support, primarily, but also has the side effect of
> mandating GForth on POSIX-based systems).  Moreover, no other Forth
> for Posix-based systems, that I'm aware of, supports ffcall using the
> same wordset that GForth does.  And, I positively know that SwiftForth
> is totally different still.
>
> I find Haskell (in particular, since I'm familiar with it) to be as
> expressive as Forth in most applications I've written with it.  I
> don't see any reason why OCaml would be less so, since it too is a
> functional programming language.  Since you can work with a very high
> level, functional language and still get code that is on par with
> optimized C (or even better in some cases), supports garbage
> collection, simply does not possess the concept of the null pointer
> (since all structures are initialized from component values, there is
> no concept of a null), et. al., to me it is a total no-brainer.
>
> However, if the project is already written in C(++), you'll be better
> off keeping it in the same language until a "total rewrite" is called
> for.  I'd rather have working software, even if it is developed using
> a 40-year old language.  We live in the age of the jet-engine, but we
> still ship the bulk of our goods via ocean transport; there's a good
> reason for this.  :)
>
> -- 
> Samuel A. Falvo II
>
>
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-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Farewell Ophelia, 9/22/1991 - 7/25/2007





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