iiiii~iiii~!!iiii~i~i~i~iiiiiiiiiiiiii!iii~iiii~!i!ii~iiiii~iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii~!i~!ii!!!!iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii~iiiiii~iiiiiiiiiiiiiii~iii~iii~!;i~i!~i~;~!!!!!!i!ii!i!!i!iiiii!!iii~i! ii!i~iii!iiii~i;i~iii!~!~i!!~i~i!~!~iiiii!iiiiiii~ii!iii~i~!i!iiiii!i~iii~i!~ii~i~i;i~iiii!~i~i~i~iii~!iiiiiiiiiii~i~i~ tor/es, needed to be coded. Needless to say, this observation pleased no-one. Programs are the art of programmers. Their appearance, style, and function are at the whim of their creator. It is rare that efficiency or utility are dominant considerations. The most important concern is probably the programme£s career. The program must fit into his straategy of past and future work. A complex program is much more valuable than a simple one. I have seen a number of UNIX applications. UNIX has numerous convenfiom and, I presume, support for them. Many applications ignore these and provide slightly different equivalents. These are rarely better but they provide a creative outlet. They also create bugs. I know about bugs. I know how hard it is to guarantee that even a simple program Hill work. I'm a pragmatic person and I've been accused of being insensitive to the needs of naive users. Nonetheless, I would not ship software with the bugs I've discovered. When I can run the same simulation and get three different results, I get annoyed! The best staff in the world, motivated and caring, cannot support more than a certain degree of complexity. When they boast that no-one understands the systeem, give it up. System, was developed by the Department of Measuring Techniques of the University ofAachen in cooperationwith the large Aachen clinic Bynow FG has grown to 370 members mostly due to the effortsof Heinz Schnitter,one of the three directors. pubFG fishesthe magazine VierteDimension four times a year and you can get in touch with FG via modern at +49 89 7259625 (8N1, 1200/2400 baud). A French publication mostly dedicated to Forth is Yedi, published by: AssociationYedi c/o Marc Pelrernan 17, Rue de la Lancette F-75012 Paris +33 1 49856367 Marc is the aunhor of a public domain Forth system which seems to be widely used in France. Please mark your calendar forthisyear'seuroFORML which w~l be held from October 13-15 (NOT in September as previously reported), immediately preceeding the SYSTEMS'89 trade show in Munich. International partidpafion seems to be high - we got registrations and/or inquin'~ from Germany, England, Scandinavia,Romania, the U S A and Australiaby now, which isunusual given the bad habit of the Forth community of notoriouslateregistration. you want to get a registration If form, get in touch with Marina Kern at the address below. FTL~-/IrEE/Tg0, convention and trade show dedicated to a realtime programming, willtake place from June 1%21, 1990 in Sindelfmgen near Stuttgart, West Germany.By now it is being supported by Forth GesellschafteV, Pearl eV (Pearlbeing a realtime PL/I dialect)and willbe in cooperationwith ACM. SIEMENS is going to partidpate. It is being organized by: Dipl. Ing. Ludwig Drebinger. Presse- und Messe- Agentur friardie Elektronik Alpenblick 18 D-8196 Achmuhle +49 8171 17730 FAX: 16878 Note: first silicon of E-T-A'sForth chip has been produced but not tested yet. More about it in the next issue. Klaus Schleisiek-Kern DELTAt GmbH Uhlenhorster Weg3 D-2000 Hamburg 76 +49402296441 FAX: 22972O5 Klaus.Schleisiek-Kern is our European corres p o n d e n t . H e is w e l l K n o w n i n t h e F o r t h c o m u n i t y s i n c e 1 9 8 0 f o r h i s w o r k o n tlae Conclusion Forth has a marvelous opportunity as the only alternative to increasingly elaborate and unsatisfactory software. As the novelty of software applications wears off, users will demand acceptable levels of performance and accuracy. The existence proofs offered by academics Hill not be accepted as solutions to real-world problems. As investors learn that programming costs are one-time, and that replicating bugs is not cost-effective, the value of real programming tools will increase. And as the marriage of Forth and hardware matures, good solutions will reveal today's soRware as the garbage it is. iii~!~!~!ii!!~i~iiiiiiiiii~!~i~i~!~ii~iiiii~iiiiiiiii~ii~i~i~i~!!i~iii~ii~ii Klaus Schleisiek-Kern Forth Gesellschaff eV (FG) held their annual meeting in Aachen from April 7-9, 1989. Itwas hosted bythe University of Aachen, Department of Digital ~ ~ ¢ $ Process Control. Fifty people attended and 15 presentations were given. A very impressive network of Forth based workstations for medical image data processing was presented. The backbone of the network is a 275 Mbit/sec optical multiduster communication system. PACS, the Picture Archiving and Communication o f t h e F o r t h i n t e r p r e t e r a n d cornviler and he was an active member of the Forth S t a n d a r d s T e a m t h a t led to t h e F o r t h . S 3 standard. He is the principal author of volksFORTH, a p u b l i c d o m a i n v e r s i o n d i s t r i b u t e d b y F o r t h G e s e l i s c h a f t eV o f w h i c h h e i s one of the founding members. mt e r n a i s

/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/euroforth-OlvTXUXrsm