On Monday, January 1, 2018 at 5:24:35 PM UTC-7,
hughag...@gmail.com wrote:
For a long time I believed that the above problems with FIND made ANS-Forth unusable.
Then I remembered the disambiguifiers that Anton Ertl invented:
: if state @ 0= if cr ." WARNING: *** no interpretation semantics for: IF ***" cr then
postpone if ; immediate
This fixes all of the problems with FIND listed above!
The disambiguifiers are the heart and soul of ANS-Forth programming!
Section 4.1.2 said that an ambiguous condition is:
"attempting to obtain the execution token, (e.g., with 6.1.0070 ', 6.1.1550 FIND, etc.)
of a definition with undefined interpretation semantics."
We are no longer attempting this however, because now we are using FIND
to obtain the xt of a user-written word (the disambiguifier).
Stephen Pelc lied when he said that the disambiguifiers don't work.
Now Stephen Pelc has his sycophant Hans Bezemer desperately claiming
that ANS-Forth's statement that FIND and tick behavior being undefined for
51 words in ANS-Forth is: "the end of the line." This is from:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.forth/c/hp1MbSkew08
On Thursday, February 9, 2023 at 8:40:04 AM UTC-7, Hans Bezemer wrote:
On Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at 8:42:14 PM UTC+1, Hugh Aguilar wrote:
Stephen Pelc totally lied when he said that the disambiguifiers don't work. The disambiguifiers fix the bug in ANS-Forth that makes FIND and tick ambiguous
and unusable on all of the words in ANS-Forth (51 of them) whose definition includes
the statement: "Interpretation semantics for this word are undefined." https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.forth/c/T-yYkpVwYew/m/tNE4Q9aNDwAJ
Well, if the standards state "Interpretation semantics for this word are undefined" then
that's the end of the line. You state yourself that's due to "a bug in ANS Forth". Hence,
if a compiler is ANS compliant, it will contain that "bug". So what is exactly bugging you:
the "bug" in ANS or the "bug" in VFX "not conforming to ANS. I lost track.
Hans is lying! This is not the: "end of the line."
The truth is that the disambiguifiers work around this bug in ANS-Forth.
Hans attempts to weasel out of this lie by saying that he "lost track" of what the discussion is about. No he didn't! He never understood what the discussion was about. He doesn't know what disambiguifiers are. He doesn't care,
because he just wants to blindly support Stephen Pelc without any regard
for the truth or with any knowledge of ANS-Forth. Hans Bezemer is in the same category as Juergen Pintaske --- his loyalty is equaled only by his ignorance.
Back in 1994, UR/Forth from LMI was the premier professional Forth system.
The purpose of ANS-Forth was to kill UR/Forth by declaring it by fiat to be non-standard. In those days, MPE was one minor competitor to Forth Inc.,
along with several other minor competitors. None of them were competitive
with UR/Forth. All of the minor competitors to Forth Inc. were killed off
by ANS-Forth except for MPE that survived and is now dominant.
Why did MPE survive?
I think that Stephen Pelc made a deal with Elizabeth Rather that she would
not kill MPE off by declaring his Forth system to be non-standard, but she would allow MPE to be standard. In exchange, Stephen Pelc would write
Forth code for Forth Inc. --- Elizabeth Rather needed somebody to write
Forth code for Forth Inc. because Forth Inc. employed only salesmen.
Forth Inc. is great at selling, primarily because the name "Forth Inc." implies that they are the flagship of the Forth community, and because they can endlessly remind everybody that Charles Moore founded Forth inc.
(neglecting to mention that Charles Moore got kicked out of Forth Inc. in 1982).
Elizabeth Rather is a marketing genius!
She is not a Forth programmer though, and she doesn't employ any Forth programmers because no self-respecting Forth programmer can make it
through her novice class without laughing out loud at her ignorance of Forth. After ANS-Forth killed Forth, most of the Forth community just gave up
on Forth and switched to C programming. I didn't, because I was employed
at Testra as a Forth programmer when Forth died, but after I left Testra
I did give up on Forth programming for a long time because Forth was dead.
Stephen Pelc made a Faustian Bargain. He was allowed to survive, but
he had to sell his soul to Elizabeth Rather. Now, decades later, Stephen Pelc is still desperately trying to say that ANS-Forth was viable from a technical standpoint. He can't admit that the disambiguifiers fix the problem in ANS-Forth of FIND and tick not working, because admitting this would also require him to admit that ANS-Forth was so stupidly designed that FIND and tick don't work. FIND and tick are actually pretty basic Forth that worked just fine in Forth-83. UR/Forth etc. had FIND and tick working. ANS-Forth's failure
to get this basic Forth concept working indicates gross incompetence on
the part of Elizabeth Rather and all of her sycophants on the ANS-Forth committee.
Stephen Pelc can't tell the truth because he sold his soul and is required to lie.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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