Re:

[Penio Penev <penev@xxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, GARY B. LAWRENCE wrote:

|   A Forth system that does not try to totally copy Unix programs and
| commands should have a much simpler structure since Forth itself acts as
| the shell and interpretative Unix languages like pearl could be done by
| using Forth extensions in interpretative mode. 

[ This is off-target in the MISC list, so I'm x-posting to c.l.f ]

This idea is great, and I have certainly said many times to myself "I which
I had it working for this project."

The main problem is the lack of a "common" FORTH environment across
Unices.  FORTH is a great scripting tool, and I see no reason whatsoever,
aside from the latter, that perl, awk, tcl, sed, and company should exist
in a form different than FORTH extensions :-)

Initially, the functionality can be provided either as a pipe interface to
the original languages, or through mapping of their libraries.  Later,
functionality can be added, or replicated natively.

I, myself, would love to see gnuplot in such an environment -- I am fed up
of its limited graph-description scripts.

Or, how about a FORTH module for Apache :-)

One possibility is to standardize on Linux -- adding Linux on a network is
cheap enough, so it can be used as a FORTH server in heterogeneous
environments -- and also, Linux is the platform of choice for Open Source
(now, how does this sound :-)

Later, ports to other environments (IRIX :-) can be added to the arsenal.

--
Penio Penev <Penev@pisa.Rockefeller.edu> 1-212-327-7423