These are two announcements of independent efforts, one for the Forth
200x update of the ANS Forth standard, one is for the CoreForth very
small standard. If you are interested in one of these efforts (or
both), please join the corresponding mailing list.

Anton Ertl
---------------------- Forth 200x --------------------------------
You can find an HTML version of this on
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/ansforth/forth200x.html

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
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/ansforth/rfds.html> before
being discussed at the standards meeting. There is now a mailing list
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/forth200x/> for RfDs/CfVs and other
issues related to the Forth 200x effort. The next standards meeting
will be held on the day before EuroForth 2005, i.e., on Oct 20th, 2005
in Santander (Spain). 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
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/euroforth2004/photos/img_1824.jpg>
(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
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/ansforth/rfds.html> 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 <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/forth200x/>. 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.


------------------------ CoreForth --------------------------------
There was another workshop at EuroForth 2004, and I was asked to
inform the wider community and invite them to participate in the
resulting effort, so here we go (you have seen some of this in
comp.lang.forth already):

As far as I understand the idea, it's about having a standard for very
small Forth systems that can run on top of hardware cores like Klaus
Schleisiek's uCore or Bernd Paysan's b16, so they can share code for
implementing, e.g., TCP/IP. This standard is intended to be smaller
than the core wordset of ANS Forth. For discussing this standard a
mailing list <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coreForth/> was created.

Note that this effort is independent of the Forth 200x effort (they
may or may not interact).

You can find a picture of the blackboard from this workshop at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/euroforth2004/photos/img_1826.jpg
(1.1MB).

Peter Knaggs has done a report on this workshop
<http://dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/forth/euro/ef04/workshops.html#CoreForth>,
but what he writes in some parts differs significantly from what I
remember.
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