Forth 200x standards meeting at EuroForth 2006

RfD/CvF-Process

1. A RfD should be published, for the first time, at least 12 weeks before the meeting in order to be able to keep the other deadlines.
2. The CFV must be submitted at the latest 6 weeks before the meeting at which it is to be discussed.
3. The returning officer must publish the Current Standings at the latest 4 weeks before the meeting.
4. The CfV will then be discussed at the meeting, it is advisable for the proponent to attend the meeting to defend their proposal. If they are unable to attend, a "Champion" should be found.
5. The majority decides.

The contact details of the Committee members will be published, so that the Forth community can lobby them in place of attending the meeting.

Review of Basis document (06.2)

Peter Knaggs, the editor of the standard document, presented the document which was present as L^AT_EX-source code and in PDF-form (both of which will be published). It can be produced among other things in a Inline version, where the rationale for a word is given with the defintion of the word rather than in a seperate appendix. Naturally there were still improvement suggestions.

Discussion of CvFs

EKEY return values

Proposes a set of contants which can be used to interpret the values returned by EKEY, e.g. recognizing whether a cursor key was pressed and which. The committee requested further clarification of the relationship between EKEY and KEY, otherwise the suggestion was accepted.

Separate FP Stack

Forth systems are to guarantee that there is a separate floating point stack. The committee required that this proposal should be rewritten to make the effects on existing systems and programs clearer.

One-time file loading

This proposes a new word word required, which functions in such a way as included, if the file were not loaded yet, but does nothing if it were already loaded; additionally include and require are still standardized. This suggestion was accepted.

Discussion of RfDs

In addition, the current proposals, which had not yet reached the CFV-Stage where discussed. The reforulating of TO to allows for future changes (2VALUE and FVALUE) to be simplified arrose out of these discussions.

Further it was decided that minutes of the meeting should be published. This is considered importantly for an official standardisation organization.

Next Meeting