Re: [gforth] Gforth's fsl-util.*

[Charles Montgomery]

On Nov 25, 2012, at 7:01 AM, David Kuehling wrote:
> ...
>
> * Gforth CVS contains two files, fsl-util.4th and fsl-util.fs where
>   fsl-util.fs seems to be the more recent version, however only only
>   fs-util.4th is installed.  Is that by mistake?
The auxiliary files provided by the FSL include a version specifically  
intended for use with Gforth:
http://www.taygeta.com/fsl/library/fsl-utilg.fth
I would recommend to the distributors of Gforth that they use that  
file, or a modification of it, to distribute with Gforth.  But that's  
up to them.

It's not at all unusual for FSL users (like me) to use a personalized  
fsl-util file adjusted for personal convenience.  Of course the same  
results can be obtained with some additional files loaded before or  
after fsl-util, for the sake of "purity" if that matters.  ;-)

> * Both files suffer from printing out text to stdout during loading,
>   even with WARNINGS OFF, which makes them somewhat unusable from
>   scripts that need well-defined (machine-readable) output.  (Though
>   there's a workaround [1])
My personal opinion is that such emissions are a bad idea, not just in  
the case of script usage.  They were included in many of the early FSL  
files, and the practice has tended to continue for historical  
reasons.  Bernd's idea of a way to remove them with conditional  
compilation is one reasonable approach.

> * The Vector/Matrix indexing operators '}' and '}}' have quite some
>   overhead when implemented in Forth.  What about adding them as
>   primitives?  (I volunteer for the job unless there're objections).

The admittedly slow high-level versions of } and }} are provided for  
the sake of portability that comes from being Standard.  If you should  
come up with improvements for a specific architecture, or other things  
as suggested by Bernd, they could be made available to other FSL users  
by adding them in an auxiliary file on the taygeta site.  (Such files  
don't need to go through the reviewing process used for the Library  
Algorithms.)

regards   cgm