Big thudly Forth...

> > > I'd love something that described (in detail, with code) something really
> > > big like the Saudi Arabian airport project or the Saturn plant
> >
> >I wonder. Are you asking the "right question"?

Maybe not. And this is probably starting to get into c.l.f territory
rather than SwiftForth, so I don't plan to go much farther here...

However... I've read and re-read Brodie and others. However, almost
everything written about Forth seems to swing in a relatively constrained
orbit about the basics of with very little beyond a ten line example.
Brodie's "3 1/2 Examples" in TF were good, but they really didn't go far
enough for me because they had to be so general.

Big, instresting systems _can_ be built, just look at what all you guys do
for an existence proof! I've built some reasonably sized stuff myself (our
render farm is controlled by a networked pseudo functional dialect of
Forth), but I've never gone as far as I think I should be able to. I
always seem to run into a wall, sometimes like this:

"I have fibs and squibs, they both curdle. However the curdle for the one
is very different from the curdle for the other. Therefore, should I have
fib-curdle and then squib-curdle? Oh, and right now, squibs also brindle,
findle and glutch. However, fibs weren't doing those, so I didn't give
them a prefix. I guess they need to be squib-brindle, squib-findle and so
on. Yuck! This is awful! Brodie says hypenated names are the sign of a
problem... Yeah, there's a problem here alright. I'll do it in C and use
static functions."

Perhaps it's just my aesthetic sense getting in the way. Perhaps my
thinking is too flawed by using other languages and I still don't "get"
it. Or, as you suggest, I'm not asking the right questions. Whatever it
is, the best way I can describe it is a lack of a roadmap... Too little
intelligence on what has been done before in such situations. With, say,
Python, I have a well defined path to follow... Globals, then classes,
then modules, which takes me as far as I need. With Forth, my stuff starts
out pretty clean, but usually winds up a tortured mess at endgame.

Going through the examples of SwiftForth has been very helpful, but again
they suffer from being too small (although Tetris has been very helpful on
a number of levels (Ooh... Bad)). But what does a SwiftForth application
for doing 3D animation look like? How do you deal with multiple modules
and views and different controls and so on? I have some idea of what a big
C app might look like because there are many examples available that I can
study. This doesn't seem to be the case for Forth. There are a lot of
different Forths, but not many examples of using them for something
interesting.

I hope this explains my question. I'm a big fan of Forth, and I'm going to
keep pounding at that wall. But if any of you have a sledgehammer lying
around that you'd be willing to lend, I'd sure be glad of it!

Thanks!

Jos'h

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Received on Fri Nov 01 2002 - 07:56:18 PST