Re: New Linux 4word

On Wed, 6 Apr 2005 17:46:43 -0400 (EDT)
Mark Slicker <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Terry Loveall wrote:
> 
> > 4word was designed to aid communications between humans as much as it was
> > designed to efficiently communicate with the computer. The bulk of human
> > communication is in ASCII format, e.g. email and web browsing. Saw no
> > point in having two different text interfaces.
> >
> 
> I don't understand this rationale. While protocols for transfering web 
> pages (HTTP), and email (SMTP), are encoded in ASCII, the actual contents 
> may not be encoded in ASCII. With the proliferation of Unicode you will 
> end dealing with more than one kind of text encoding even for english. I 
> don't see what bearing this has on the source representation or even the 
> interface for text composistion.
> 
> Mark

ASCII is the bed-rock of computers. Every other data format is transitory.
The colorForth kernel is written in ASCII. And look at the first application
written in/for colorForth: the huffman to HTML translator.

Using colorForth to write communications software means you will have to deal
with it eventually. I chose to do so up front rather than take a detour.

Regards,
Terry Loveall