T* H *E F O R T H Welcome to the second issue of the ACM E S T A T E SIGForth Newsletter! l l l l l . | g Jill._ Tne Professionalism in Software quote of t~ ~ the year: "We have a perfect record on ~r-/ P software schedules -- we have never I I made one on time yet and we are always making excuses." Quoth General Bernard Randolph of the Air Force's Systems Command in an Air Force Association symposium. The state of maqitarysoftware is a "huge problem" which is indusay-wide, and electronic combat programs are a "disaster". It couldn't have anything to do with those huge and expensive Ada compilers you guys require, could it? Want another quote? "A capable programmer can understand the Forth address interpreter, compiler, text interpreter, assembler and disk operating system in a couple ofweeks. Ada promises to be the biggest boost Forth ever had." So says W. E. Drissel. But not ffyou have to spend $40,000 for anAda compiler to run on your VAX (doesn't egery software developer own several?) before you can even bid on a DoD contract. General Randolph and his co-conspirators stand indicted on charges of spending Other Peoples' Money. Yours, dear reader, yours. If ifs that expensive to get into the military software business, then it ~ become the exclusive province of a dosed group of people, who will do only military software, and never come out into the real world. Economists call that sort of thing a barr/er to entry. Ada is m software what New York taxi medallions are to transportation. If thafs not enough to scare you silly, think about this: it is a well known truism (which ~ g h t even be Irue) that one may reasonably expect a certain number of bugs in a given amount of object code. The typical Ada compiler and development envirortment runs into the megabytes- of object code. I have only once worked on a project that had that much source code, and that was bad enough! I have this nightmare: that World War III will be started by a bug. Not a bug in an SDI hunch system or a Trident firing control computer, but by a bug in an Ada compiler. Charles Curley, Editor abstracts of the papers presented at the first annual SIGForth Workshop in Austin, Texas. Exception handling is something which is customarily the province of those arcane gurus in the ivory tower of the operating system and compiler, and we plain old application programmers aren't supposed to concern ourselves with them. Much. Brad Rodriguez, of T-Recursive Technology shows the Forth approach: ifyou want one, roll it yourself. Once you understand what it is you need, you can do a better job than your compiler writer would have. Who knows more about your application, you or the compiler writer? Jay Mdvin will be fondly remembered by cmFORTH users as the guy who commented aD the code. So he probably knows it about as well as anyone, with the poss~le exception of the codes author, Chuck Moore. Jay gives us an insight into how to get rid of the target compiler and still be able to rebtdd your systern at waL lake all great ideas, ifs simple, really, once you get used to it. A matched set of articles on stream files versus blocks: Brad Rodriguez provides us with a livdy set of arguments why he prefers bloc.ksto stream files. Somewhat cooler and more of an overview is a piece by Tom Zimmer, who unleashed F-PCon the world. As for me, I always thought files were a neat way to keep my punch cards in order. Paul Frenger, our new Associate Editor, conm'butes YASCS fyet another string CASE statement) to Forth lore, cast in the mold Dr. Eaker devised in 1980. Paul also reviews a quaint and forgotten book ofyore, about the European programming language MINT, in our new Book Review Department. Rick Hoselton, our Secretary-Treasurer, teUs us about statesearching in an understated but informative artide which has AI roots. Parting Shot Sorry to say that for personal reasons I must relinquish the editorship of this publication. Don't filet, I am leaving you in the capable and eager hands of Dr Paul Frenger, beginning with the next issue. Thanks to everyone who has helped me put together this journal! Charles C u r l e y e d i t s t h e ACM SlGForth Newsletter. H e h a s w o r k e d w i t h Forth s i n c e 1979~ w h e n h e i m p l e m e n t e d it o n h i s O h i o Scientific. H e has worked at Rockwell International, Hughes ~ r e r a f t , t h e Jet P r o p u l s i o n L a b o r a t o r y a r i a a t Maxtor. H e c u r r e n t l y w o r k s a t t h e p r e m i s e s or a large and well known (but unnamed) comp u t e r v e n d o r o u t s i d e Boulder, Colorado. H e ~ d i t e d a p u b l i c a t i o n for O h i o Scientific u s e r s and has been published inside and outside t h e c o m p u t e r l~ield. H e a l s o p r o v i d e s realFORTH, a v e r s i o n o f tiae l a n g u a g e , f o r a n u m uer orprocessors ana computers. in This Issue We have the second installment of a regular column from Chuck Moore, who (as he puts it) discovered Forth many years ago. Chuck admits to actually using someone else's software, and he has some intriguing comments as a result. I didn't like rodents when they were eating my flower beds, now rm supposed to want one on my desk? His usual, urn, er, forthwrightstyle is in fiaUglory. SIGForth Chairman Shaw has a number of useful and informative things to say in this issue, including his regular column, the details of the May ANS Forth meedng~ and the

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