The Forth Scientific Library Project
Table of contents
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).
To get started, we are requesting all those that are interested in participating contact Skip Carter at skip@taygeta.com
Those that volunteer to help will be sent a coding guideline, a status report and be added to the central mailing list
scilib@taygeta.comwhich has been established to let participants correspond efficiently.
Everett (Skip) Carter Phone: 408-641-0645 FAX: 408-394-5561 Taygeta Scientific Inc. INTERNET: skip@taygeta.com 1340 Munras Ave., Suite 223 UUCP: ...!uunet!taygeta!skip Monterey, CA. 93940 WWW: http://www.taygeta.com/skip.html