The Forth Scientific Library Project

Table of contents 

  
                Introduction
The Forth Scientific Library was created by Skip Carter with the help of volunteer contributers and reviewers of code. It provides a collection of routines that may be useful to those doing scientific or numerically intensive work using Forth. Below is Skip's original announcement and proposal for the Project.

Currently the Project's activities are being coordinated by Charles Montgomery, who would welcome comments, suggestions, code contributions, or whatever, at cgm@physics.utoledo.edu 

  
             Skip's Original Introduction
The Forth language is at an important cross-road with regard to its use as a general scientific programming language. The new FORTRAN-90 is just becoming available and long time FORTRAN programmers are finding it different enough that many are wondering if they might as well learn a new language instead of sticking with FORTRAN. If the Forth community plays its hand right, that alternate language could be Forth. To do so Forth needs to overcome the standard complaints of the FORTRAN community:

  1. Its not standardized, so how can I port my software ?
  2. I have lots of pre-existing FORTRAN code that works perfectly well and I am not in any hurry to re-write it. Can Forth interface with my FORTRAN code ?
  3. There are no scientific libraries in Forth.

The recently adopted ANS Forth handily addresses #1, and in fact it is the adoption of the standard that makes issues #2 and #3 worth addressing.

With regard to #2, I think the adoption of the standard will help here, since the interface to other software is the kind of feature that will distinguish one vendors ANS Forth from anothers. While the standard does not address such interfaces, I don't think that there will be too much divergence on how this is done. The Unix world has no such standard, and I have only encountered 2 different C-FORTRAN conventions in over 15 years of using Unix.

So #1 is now solved, and the vendors will (I hope!) address #2. The third point can be addressed by the Forth community itself. Several potential scientific users of Forth discussed these issues at the 1994 Rochester Forth Conference. It was decided that we should undertake the project of writing a scientific library in ANS Forth.

The plan is to write a set of Forth words to implement such libraries as the ACM libraries, BLAS, LINPACK, etc. The libraries will be publicly available in source form (in some sort of "public" release: public domain, copyleft, copyrighted but freely distributable, etc).
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 Everett (Skip) Carter          Phone: 831-641-0645 FAX:  831-641-0647
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