Re: [RE: [colorforth] Program input]

[Samuel Falvo <falvosa@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Paul Graham in  http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/accgensub.html says (I
> just checked it again):
> "I can't tell yet if you can write the program in Forth. I've had several
> Forth submissions and I'm still trying to puzzle out whether they're
> correct."

Paul is a Lisp-machine bigot in every sense of the word.  I've also submitted
an accumulator generator to him -- four, in fact, all of which fully fulfilled
his requirements.  Every one, he rejected.  See, his expectations are that the
Forth environments used to make this perform the same kinds of background
processing that the Lisp engines do.  No disrespect towards Paul, but that is a
fundamental misunderstanding of the whole point of Forth, which is total
exposure of the underlying machine to the programmer -- there is no "hidden"
anything going on.  Hence, no garbage collection, no passing functions around
as objects, and no variable bindings like Lisp.

In short, it is fundamentally impossible to satisfy Paul's requirements with
Forth, purely because Forth isn't Lisp; moreover, unlike other forms of
languages, Forth cannot be adequately described as a "subset of Lisp."

> I think we can write this program in Forth :). The link from my site ponts

If you wish to satisfy his requirements as well, you also need to re-implement
a large percentage of Lisp's virtual machine environment as well.  It's not
worth the effort.  I'd just rather let him live in his delusional world.

Some people might confuse my above complaint as bitterness.  I can assure you,
it's stark reality, not bitterness.  Anyone who has had any dealings with Paul
on *why* their submission got rejected will realize just how jaded he really is
towards Lisp.

--
Samuel A. Falvo II


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