Re: MISC-d Digest V97 #35

[jfox@xxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

>From: Christophe Lavarenne <Christophe.Lavarenne@inria.fr>
>Subject: hardware stacks

Excellent.  As always thanks from everyone for an excellent reply.

>From: "M. Edward Borasky" <znmeb@plaza.ds.adp.com>
>
>With all due respect to Chuck, I don't believe there has ever been a useful
programming language that you could teach anyone over the age of ten with
average intelligence in ten minutes.  I don't believe there has ever been a
version of Forth that could be taught in 10 minutes either. The closest
thing I know of is a programmable pocket calculator.  

Well Chuck didn't say he could, he said he would like to be able to.
There is a difference.  It is a challange not a boast.

Clearly one of his goals has been to continue to strip down and
simply his Forth.  I think it can be small and still be useful.  I
like the goal and challange of designing a Forth that is very
teachable.  This was not one of the original design goals of Forth.
When I learned Fig-Forth the word teachability was there, but
clearly at the bottom of the list of design goals.  Perhaps if we
put it near the top we might get a ten minute Forth.

>From: Andrew Sieber <asieber@usa.net>
>Subject: Color Forth

>I find Chuck's idea very interesting.  The only use of color I've seen
>in source code was augmentation of the standard syntax, not
>replacement.  \ \

>semicolon, etc. in the source code.  One could just as easily write a
>special text editor that _visually_ eliminated all the colons and turned
>words immediately following those colons into red text; the editor would
>thus consider a colon to be an embedded command meaning "make the next
>word red".  This would have the same visual effect as Chuck's color
>Forth but would not have to make use of a new syntax; 

Yes, and Chuck would encourage you to experiment with such a thing and
report your results.  He is also interested in using smaller than 8
bit characters and compressing the source by a few characters by
using these color tokens in the source.  But you are quite right 
that these _are_ two different things.

Your description of a color Forth program editor was quite interesting.

>From: Mark Tillotson <markt@ctf.com>
>Subject: Videotape of SV FIG meeting
>
>Thanks to Jeff for the update. If there is a videotape the FIG meeting,
>I would also buy a copy.

Sorry, no video tape this time.  Perhaps I will arrange an interview
with Chuck where I can ask him some leading questions and tape his
answers.  Sort of like the one I did up on the mountain a few years
ago.  I was told that I captured Chuck's presentation very well even
if I did miss a little here and there by people who were there.

>From: Mark Tillotson <markt@ctf.com>
>Subject: i21 in Sanyo TV?

>While searching for news on iTV, I noticed (on a Price Waterhouse page)
>that iTV has gotten a second round of funding from Sanyo. I also see that
>Sanyo is making internet enabled TV's:
>http://www.sanyo.co.jp/koho/hypertext4-eng/9609news-e/0909int.html
>I wonder then, is this where  we will see the first i21 based products, or is
>iTV's Pegasus still on track?  Is a product release date in sight?  Are any
>comments allowed? ;-)

no comment, yes, but no comment on the "or", yes, soon, yes, some. ;-)

>From: "Houghton,Andrew" <houghtoa@oclc.org>
>Subject: RE: Color Forth

>	I agree, Chuck is missing something important.  Having worked
>with someone, for the past ten years,
>	who is color blind -- a programming language which relies on
>color is just plainly a bad idea.

Font selection or some other visually distinguishable feature could
be used for color blind Forth.  :-)  The idea is that Chuck is
experimenting with new ways to simply his Forth.

Chuck likes large Fonts.  He couldn't fit "OVER OVER OVER OVER OVER OVER"
on one line in OKAD, not ever close.  I think small fonts are about as
good for Chuck as colors for a color blind person.

But more importantly perhaps recognizing the shape of a font, or the
color of a font is done by a different collection or parts in your
nervous system than recognition of symbols.  It is difficult to really
know what effect that would have on visualization and understanding
of the programming ideas being expressed.

>they face.  The biggest challenge this
>	person is facing now in this Web enabled world is visiting
>vendors Web sites, to obtain programming 
>	information, which don't provide enough contrast between their
>color schemes thus making the pages 
>	unreadable to the person.

I can imagine.  I am not one, but many people prefer text only browsers.
Perhaps they are more useful for some.  It sounds like they might be
for people with this problem.  Or perhaps the OS or browser could allow
color substitutions for ones that would be recognizable.

I have often noted that some people like looking at color settings on
their machines that I could not look at for five minutes!

Jeff Fox 
jfox@dnai.com    Ultra Technology Inc. 
http://www.dnai.com/~jfox/