Re: Stack vs stackless operation

But, SQUARE is a high-level "colon" definition… [..]” etc.

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( https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm )

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Many of these steps in particular cases can be avoided
by the use of proposed OOS words, making (at least sometimes)
the Forth program faster — and, as a kinda "bonus", clarity
of the code increases.

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After having avoided premature optimisation, every 'decent'
Forth programmer will recode some few bottleneck words e.g.
in assembler, where necessary. IOW microbenchmarking SQUARE,
which can be implemented in a handful of lines of machine code
or less, does not bring new insights.

I agree with you - still it does take decent Forth programmer.
Recall the ones described by Jeff Fox? These Forth programmers,
that refused to use Machine Forth just because "they were hired
to program in ANS Forth"?
I don't believe they were be able to recode anything in
assembler - and note, it was about 30 years ago. Since that
time assembler programming became even less popular.
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