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by dewster 3157 days ago
Pure stack machines don't have local variables. They have at most two stacks and that's it.
1 comments

I was under the impression we were talking about Forth, not a pure stack machine
Both. And under the hood, Forth implements a virtual stack machine on top of a non-stack machine, which is inefficient.

I guess I'm just trying to counter all the mythos and happy talk surrounding Forth and stack processing in general. In the end Forth is a highly (too?) simplistic language, a product of its time, and nothing all that special or powerful. It does a lot of stuff poorly and the code tends to write-only. The syntax is so loose that the entire dictionary has to be searched to know you're dealing with a number. It's no mystery that we aren't all coding on it now.