From: ruvim.pinka@gmail.com   
      
   On 2025-10-05 15:51, Hans Bezemer wrote:   
   > On 05-10-2025 13:25, Ruvim wrote:   
   > I'd be happy to support LATEST-NAME as a preprocessor macro (although I   
   > doubt 4tH's LATEST is compatible), but I won't be introducing it in the   
   > native 4tH compiler for the following reasons:   
   >   
   > Moore:   
   >   
   > "There are diverging programming styles in the Forth community. One uses   
   > hyphenated words that express in English what the word is doing. You   
   > string these big long words together and you get something that is quite   
   > readable. But I immediately suspect that the programmer didn’t think out   
   > the words carefully enough, that the hyphen should be broken and the   
   > words defined separately. That isn’t always possible, and it isn’t   
   > always advantageous. But I suspect a hyphenated word of mixing two   
   > concepts."   
   >   
   > Which is part of TF, also tip 5.19 *"Favor short words"*   
   >   
   > .. and LATEST-WORD is not short.   
      
      
      
   > We had a good word there, LATEST, which I guess does at least 90%   
   > of the work proposed, so why not take that one?   
      
   Many Forth systems provide "LATEST", which behaves differently, and   
   changing its behavior would be backward incompatible for them.   
   Therefore, it's unlikely that vendors will change the behavior of the   
   existing word in their system and existing programs that use it (even if   
   the behavior difference is only incompatible in some cases).   
      
      
   Example.   
   SP-Forth/4 has provides the word `REQUIRE` since 2001, and it was used   
   in thousands of files. Later, a word with the same name but slightly   
   different semantics was introduced in Forth-2012. Of course, SP-Forth/4   
   cannot provide this word, as this would be backward incompatible change   
   for existing programs.   
      
      
      
   > It is a tendency I see within Forth-200x to take longer and longer   
   > words, just to avoid any collisions with existing words. And I don't   
   > think that's a smart move.   
      
   Probably, a better way would be to require systems to provide only   
   standard words in `forth-wordlist`, and for programs to *explicitly*   
   include a system-specific word list into the search order (if they need   
   it). But many people don't like this approach.   
      
      
   [...]   
      
      
   --   
   Ruvim   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)