Re: New brainfart for threaded VFS and data passing between threads.

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05 Apr 2004 20:27:47 GMT
Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Chris Pressey wrote:
> >>     Forth is unreadable and unmaintainable.
> >
> >I have a theory that Forth is more readable for someone whose native
> >language has SOV (or OSV) word order.
> 
> I'm not sure word order matters: lisp is often much more readable than
> C but no human language I'm familiar with has a VSO word order.

I'm not sure it does either; as I said, it's a theory.  Forth is not
(AFAIK) particularly popular in Japan, for example.

FTR Welsh has VSO word order, but your point that VSO is not in the
majority is quite valid; the distribution in human language is roughly:

	SOV	45%
	SVO	42%
	VSO	 9%
	VOS	 3%
	OVS	<1%
	OSV	<1%

(Might SVO and the dominance of English in programming go some way to
explaining the popularity of C++/Java's subject.verb(object) syntax?)

Interestingly though, I find LISP hard to read for extended periods of
time too, for the opposite reason as Forth -- LISP has *too much*
punctuation.

> I've seen a quote somewhere that C "combines the simplicity of
> assembly language with the power of assembly language".  That seems to
> be even more true of Forth.  

And logically it would be most true of assembly.  :)

Anyway, the semantics of these languages aren't too different, so on a
purely syntactic basis, I definately prefer C's syntax to Forth's or
LISP's.  Mainly because of the distribution of punctuation.

-Chris