Talk:Forth (programming language)/GA1

GA Reassessment

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This article has been reviewed as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force in an effort to ensure all listed Good articles continue to meet the Good article criteria. In reviewing the article, I have found there are some issues that may need to be addressed, listed below. I will check back in seven days. If these issues are addressed, the article will remain listed as a Good article. Otherwise, it may be delisted (such a decision may be challenged through WP:GAR). If improved after it has been delisted, it may be nominated at WP:GAN. Feel free to drop a message on my talk page if you have any questions, and many thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this article thus far.

• <moan> It is rather disheartening to maintain this article. A few years ago, we had Elizabeth Rather herself author the majority of this article. But since then various editors hacked it to pieces and add their own disjointed exposition on their obscure favorite features. </moan> --IanOsgood (talk) 19:20, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

• Large sections of this article are completely uncited, for example Overview, The stacks, and Programmer's perspective.
  • In my opinion, much of the Programmer's perspective section reads like a programmers guide, and thus should be cut from the article (see comments in the Removal of the "Structure of the language" section above). Are you lending weight to this opinion? --IanOsgood (talk) 19:20, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
    • Yes, I am, although my main point is the presence of large uncited sections. --Malleus Fatuorum 20:37, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

• The prose needs some attention:
  • "Forth was first exposed to other programmers ...". Strange use of the word "exposed".
    • Suggestion? Seems good to me.
  •  Done"The compiler comprises a set of commands within the interpreter." Should be "consists of".
  • "... a programmer can define new application-specific defining words ...". Reads rather awkwardly.
  •  Done"... systems which obey the 1994 ANS Forth standard". Standards aren't "obeyed", they're conformed to, or complied with.

•  Done"The net result performs similarly to this function written in the C programming language." Claims like these need to be sourced.
  • The intent was to show a the same thing in a more widely known language. Is the new wording better?

•  Done "As a 'jack of all trades' ...". All direct quotations need to be sourced.

•  Done "Forth is broadly comparable to BASIC ...". In whose opinion? Seems nothing like it to me.

•  Done "Here is an example of a programmer 'developing' the hello world program." Why the scare quotes?

• Parts of this article read like a eulogy for Forth instead of a dispassionate encyclopedia article. For instance: "A well-designed Forth program reads like natural language, and implements not just a single solution, but also sets of tools to attack related problems."
  • This is a widely touted feature of the Forth design philosophy. I'll try to dig up a source.
    • Have a look at Thinking in Forth (depending on version, ANS Forth or not) p. 19 or 8. : breakfast hurried? IF cereal ELSE eggs THEN clean ; There ar more examples like this in that book, though at low level it probably is a bit less natural. Johan G (talk) 21:37, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
      • Doesn't look particularly "natural language" to me. In any event, this claim is by no means unique to FORTH. Smalltalk amongst others makes the same claim, and more convincingly IMO. What about "aJanitor open: aDoor with: aKey" for instance? --Malleus Fatuorum 21:56, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

• The Implementations section reads like a sales brochure.
  • Could you be more specific? This is a list AFAIK of the major vendors and distributions and their distinguishing attributes.
    • There are links to commercial companies, specifically stating that they sell FORTH implementations rather than to information about those implementations. Also, one of the links is simply entitled "commercial implementations", which points to an external page that links to some of the commercial products already listed. Why have a link to a list of implementations in a list of implementations? --Malleus Fatuorum 20:44, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

• External links should only appear in the External links section.
  • In general, yes. However, for the Implementations section, I am simply following the examples I've seen in other programming language articles, which treat this section as a more specifically categorized external links section.
    • I was thinking more of external links such as the one in the Maintenance section. --Malleus Fatuorum 20:47, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

•  DoneThe See also section needs to be pruned. The connection between PostScript and Forth is at best tenuous, for instance. Others like the Canon Cat seem almost equally irrelevant, and Elizabeth Rather is already linked within the article.

•  DoneThe References seems to be a mixture of quoted sources and further reading. Those publications not cited in the text should be moved to a new Furrher reading section.
  • Actually, the sections were misnamed.

•  DoneThe External links section currently looks like a linkfarm and needs to be pruned.
  • Yeah, this grows and is pruned about annually. I pruned some good links which need to be turned into references:
• Computerworld Interview with Charles H. Moore on Forth
• The Evolution of FORTH, an Unusual Language by Charles H. Moore
• Forth family tree and timeline

• The lead is too short to adequately summarise the article.

•  DoneSomething needs to be said about the current status of the language.
  • I added a paragraph to the lead.

•  Done"In ANS Forth, the current state of the interpreter can be read ...". Is this ANSI Forth?
  • The proper term is ANS Forth (American National Standard Forth, though I've never seen this expansion in literature). I've had to correct this by well meaning editors at least a dozen times... don't get me started...
    • Then why does the article talk about ANSI FORTH, as in "multitasking words and support are not covered by the ANSI Forth Standard"? --Malleus Fatuorum 20:29, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

• Language versions?
  • Not sure what you mean here. There are implementations listed, and the standards mentioned in the History section. (There isn't a centralized implementation like Python or Perl.)
    • Is there only one version of the ANSI standard? Who produced the de facto standards before 1994? When is the 200x ANSI standard due? --Malleus Fatuorum 20:33, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
      • In the early days there was the de-facto public domain FIG-Forth wich was ported to many systems, then came Forth-79, and then Forth-83, wich seems to be the more commonly used standard until ANS Forth came. I'm not sure about the implementation details though. Johan G (talk) 23:07, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

--Malleus Fatuorum 16:13, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm stil not entirely happy about the lack of citations in a few sections of this article, but I'm not unhappy enough about that to remove its GA listing. Thanks for the work that's been done during this reassessment. --Malleus Fatuorum 02:01, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.