Notes from November 2001 Meeting


FIG Notes from the Informal Forth Day proceedings
November 17, 2001
John A. Peters


I got there in time for STEAK and hot dogs for lunch thanks to Dr. Ting. Last year he presented hamburger and hot dogs.

I was not at the morning session but I am told that Dr. Ting made great strides with extending the WINSOUND.F music program on Win32Forth. I think he may have demonstrated the system in the morning? He can play 6 notes at once which makes a chord.


Wil Baden is back at the keyboard after a six-month illness. He came up from LA. He is now even more intent on continuing to perfect his web page. He finds his code to be in use over the widest area of any and it is all in the public domain.

His MARKUP program presents plain text as HTML when funneled through his MARKUP program, which treats varying levels of indentation as the key to create the same effect as an HTML tag. Go to his web page and click on the TEXT button to see the indented source.

Wil uses an ALPHABETIC LINKED LIST as a form of a database (For the shorthand program?)

Wil says rather than use Object Oriented Programming; Vocabularies are just as good if not better in Forth. Vocabularies are good for information hiding.

He finds his GO-TO and LABLE to be very useful in certain cases.

His NATURAL SHORTHAND is properly called THIN AND FAST WRITING and it saves 20 to 30 percent of the keystrokes. Determining the best abbreviations was quite a study. One of the rules is that an abbreviation must save at lease three keystrokes. Some times the best abbreviation uses the first and last letters of the word. He uses a Porter Stem routine to look up words. The stem of the word FORMATION is FORM but something about how it also looks up the ATION part of the word.

Wil's LINE FILTER has been found to be very useful. He can use it some how to compile a portion of a file. Editor routines are very easy and have developed in to a good thing for him.

Links:
http://home.earthlink.net/~neilbawd/
http://www.boston-baden.com/

John Peters (me) with the help of others was able to find the facilities manager and help him bring in the proper video projector that works with window machines. For some reason it does not work with Wil’s Apple Titanium note book.

I hooked up my note book and demonstrated some improvements to WinView. Audience members had questions and other members were invited up to demonstrate how to do things: We learned how to highlight more than one screen full, and how to scroll the screen smoothly via CTL-ARROW. I showed my VIRTUAL-SCREEN-PAGE-DOWN. I showed the source line in WINVIEW.F where I added some code in VIEW-KEY-LOOP to bind F7 to the browse-edit toggle. The group liked the group participation, and we plan to continue with the video projector demonstrations next month.

Next month I will show my VIRTUAL SCREEN editor modification or VSCR or VBLKs or variable size blocks or etc. that is under development as part of my converting my F83s application to Win32Forth.


Chuck Moore presented his latest Forth. I had to leave, but he was showing a program where each word was in color (For example, green and light green for variables and values?) in the source not just in the VLIST like it as done in F-PC. Currently he saves the source on a disk that is totally Forth based and does not use any code or OS from any other system or as Wil would say from some other "profane language". Chuck always shows the top of the stack in the lower left of the screen.

Links:

Interview of Chuck Moore by Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/19/1712249

Chuck will present at EuroForth
http://dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/forth/euro/


Other weblinks:

The Risks Digest - Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

Netronics 2001 - The Conference and Trade Show to Empower Next-Generation Network Infrastructure Design!
February 26-28, 2002
San Jose Convention Center
http://www.netronics2001.com/

Capitol Steps
http://www.capsteps.com/