RE: New Linux 4word

Hi Mark + Terry,

I consider ASCII to be transitory. I reckon I am about 10 - 20 evenings away
from a complete colorForth in colorForth. But free evenings are rare these
days.... :(

There is a real culture shock when leaving the "bedrock" of ASCII. Its a bit
like when Wily Coyote runs over the cliff - he's fine until he looks down.
In fact life without ASCII is surprisingly solid, provided you don't look
down!

Chuck's original cf includes ASCII<-->cf tables, and I have extended it in
my distribution to include a complete 7 bit ASCII font.

A similar culture shock is the limited character set of the colorForth
tokens - I wanted to add "x = 1234" etc to the Mandelbrot program and my
first reaction was panic - cf has no "=" sign in its token set. But a quick
paradigm shift, a tweak or two with the Icon editor and it turns out to be
completely trivial. So trivial, in fact that it looked impossible.

I learnt that token value, meaning and glyph are be three separate things,
and that you don't need ASCII ( or any other standard ) to use them. This is
why I like colorForth!

Regards

Howerd  8^)

PS any news on USB?




-----Original Message-----
From: Terry Loveall [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 07 April 2005 03:04
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [colorforth] 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

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