Forth 200x

Online Resources: RfDs/CfVs, mailing list home page
Documents: Drafts in PDF and source form (CVS access to source may come in the future if there is enough demand).
2007 standards meeting (Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany): Agenda, Draft Minutes, Report.
2006 standards meeting (Cambridge, England): Agenda, Minutes, Report.
2005 standards meeting (Santander, Spain): Announcement, Minutes, Report.

Next meeting

The next voting standards meeting will be held on the day before EuroForth 2008, i.e., on Sep 25th, 2008 in Vienna (Austria); there will probably be a non-voting review meeting the day before the Forth-Tagung 2008 (in late April) in Ulm (Germany).

The short story

A new standards process (Forth 200x) for updating the '94 standard is underway. It will produce a formal standards document; proposals for changes to the '94 standard should run through the RfD/CfV process before being discussed at the standards meeting. There is now a mailing list for RfDs/CfVs and other issues related to the Forth 200x effort. It has not been decided whether an official standards body (like ISO) will be involved.

The long story

At EuroForth 2004 we had a workshop Forth 2005 about an update of the Forth standard. There's a picture of the blackboard (1.3MB) that summarizes the main points. The participants decided to take some votes, so you see some vote results. Here's the decoded (and more bandwidth-friendly) form:

Should such an effort be done at all? Most people seemed to like the idea.
Should the new effort only deal with existing practice, or also with new ideas?
Should we use the RfD/CfV process to produce semiformal proposals for changes to the standard before we decide on the new standard (vote: 13 yes: 0 no: 2 abstain).
It turned out that a number of participants do not read Usenet; therefore a public moderated mailing list (with a public archive) was proposed, and Peter Knaggs volunteered as moderator (14Y:0N:1A). The mailing list was created right away: Forth200x, and moderation currently happens by getting approved as a member of the mailing list (only members are allowed to post). You can become a member right away by sending a request to forth200x-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or via the mailing list homepage. I am not yet sure if and how an RfD can be processed in parallel in comp.lang.forth and in the mailing list, but I will try it at least for those RfDs that I do.
Should we run the standard through a standards body like ANSI, ISO, IEEE, etc.? If so, which one? Opinions were divided on that, but most seemed to agree that we should get going and possibly create a new standards document first, and deal with a standards body later (if at all). It was proposed to defer answering the question for 1 year (12Y:0N:3A). One argument against involving standards bodies is that they want to have an exclusive copyright on the document, so that even the developers of the standards have lose the right to copy and continue to develop it.
Document format questions and a standards editor. Some people favoured starting with the HTML version of the standard and sticking with that format, others favoured MS Word (which many strongly opposed), some proposed using LaTeX. One argument for Word was that it supports change bars which supposedly other document formats don't. Finally someone pointed out that the editor of the standards document has to be comfortable with the document format. Anton Ertl volunteered as editor (15Y:0N:0A). One problem with that is that I was also volunteered and approved as chairman of the effort, but I guess that can be resolved before the editor role becomes active.
Should there be a standards meeting? Where and when? We decided to have a standards meeting 1 day before the next EuroForth (9Y:0N:7A), i.e., on Oct 20th, 2005 in Santander (Spain). The standards meeting should only deal with proposals that have run through the RfD/CfV process.
Anton Ertl was nominated chairman, and should inform the Forth community (in the form of the various known formal and informal groups) of this effort.

Anton Ertl