On Aug 18, 6:23 pm, Standish P <stnd...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Aug 17, 6:38 pm, John Passaniti <john.passan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > You asked if Forth "borrowed" lists from Lisp. It did not. In Lisp, > > lists are constructed with pair of pointers called a "cons cell". > > That is the most primitive component that makes up a list. Forth has > > no such thing; in Forth, the dictionary (which is traditionally, but > > not necessarily a list) is a data structure that links to the previous > > word with a pointer. > > Would you show me a picture, ascii art or whatever for Forth ? I know > what lisp lists look like so I dont need that for comparison. Forth > must have a convention and a standard or preferred practice for its > dicts. However, let me tell you that in postscript the dictionaries > can be nested inside other dictionaries and any such hiearchical > structure is a nested associative list, which is what linked list, > nested dictionaries, nested tables are.
You can see an example of lists in my novice package (in the list.4th file): http://www.forth.org/novice.html Also in there is symtab, which is a data structure intended to be used for symbol tables (dictionaries). Almost nobody uses linked lists for the dictionary anymore (the FIG compilers of the 1970s did, but they are obsolete). I must say, I've read through this entire thread and I didn't understand *anything* that *anybody* was saying (especially the OP). I really recommend that people spend a lot more time writing code, and a lot less time with all of this pseudo-intellectual nonsense. This whole thread (and most of what I see on C.L.F. these days) reminds me of the "dialectic method" of the early Middle Ages --- a lot of talk and no substance. Write some programs! Are we not programmers? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
