Challenges for Forth

Three areas where Forth would seem to be lagging arepresentedalong with suggestions for their resolution. They are: online help i~ormation,jloating point, and parallelism Forth seems to be stuck back in the eight and sixteen bit world of early microprocessors and low end minicomputers (remember them?). Microprocessors and memory chips are marching forward at what continues to be an exponential costiperformance rate. Megabyte and megaflop home computers are a reality. Some of this increasing cost/performance can be allocated to help the programmer. ONLINE HELP INFORMATION The computer I use at work has 24 megabytes of memory and the application software I use has some three hundred routines or operators. Finding the right operator and the information on how to use it involves searching a crib sheet and then looking up the routine in the manuals. There is online help but it is not very fast and does not have the right “hyper-text” organization. Part of the problem is that the CRT screen can not equal the resolution and page size of printed text. One would think that the speed of the computer could compensate for the lack of screen resolution. I come home to a computer with only thee megabytes of memory and a Forth package with Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted, provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/orsPKIc permission. 01991 ACM 0-89791-462-7/90/0200-0095 $1.50 four thousand operators. Well, I have not yet done a crib sheet for it and the manual is half the size of the one at work. What can be done? What should be done? I suspect the answers are out there only waiting for universal acceptance so that they can become standards. One thing is for sure, I don’t learn vocabularies very fast and I’m not getting any younger.