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 sequence program in German (until 16-bit overflow).

FORTH LOAD OK GERMAN OK
 * PRUFUNG 0 1 30 0 TUN VERT DUP . UBER + SCHLINGE ABWERFEN ABWERFEN ;

OK PRUFUNG 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765 10946 17711 28657 -19168 9489 -9679 -190 -9869 -10059

On a (slightly) more speculative note, why not extend this scheme to a computer assisted international language for computer conferences, electronic mail, and international data-base utilities? Clearly natural language is too free, and computer languages like BNF are too restrictive, to be feasible. But a hybrid, a vocabulary of several hundred unambiguous words (each used in one sense only), and perhaps some computer-oriented syntactical markers, should be enough for useful dialog within a particular interest area. If it works for two languages it should work as well for any number. The final test—whether international teams could collaborate, after minimal training—would take a few weeks programming at most, after the vocabularies and terminal interfaces had been determined.

FORTH MAILBAG
By Dave Bengel

The Forth Interest Group developed from several people in the San Francisco-San Jose area who have been working on Forth for the last year and a half. Until about six months ago most of these users were unaware of each other. Until the publication of the article by John James in Dr. Dobb's Journal (May 1978), about 80 percent of the group was from the Homebrew Computer Club—whose publication should also be watched for news concerning the F.I.G.

We now have nearly 200 names on the mailing list, and are receiving about six letters a day. The writers' main question is how to get a version for their machine.

We don't yet have a detailed description of the versions of Forth now available, nor is there a standard form of the language available for various CPUs. Intense work on implementations is now underway; e.g. the Forth Interest Group implementation workshop. We will keep you informed as more documentation and systems become available.

Your answers to the questionairequestionnaire [sic] in this newsletter will help us keep a mailing list for interest-specific applications, documentation, CPU versions, etc. We appreciate any information you can send us, particularly about Forth versions or variants which are running or being developed, or any software we can publish. We need your contributions to this newsletter (which we hope will grow into a journal). Rh FORTH INTEREST GROUP