Re: Avoid treating the stack as an array [Re: "Back & Forth" is back!]

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

Looking at an application with 154 colon definitions...

From the same app:
The easiest stack operations (DUP DROP) account for most.

Is the code for this app available?

SWAP averaged 1 in 7 definitions.  OVER 1 in 9.  Is 'stack juggling' a
problem in forth?  It doesn't appear to be.

The 100+ occurrences of DUP, DROP, and SWAP are either an abstraction
inversion (with a smart compiler, the data ends up in registers that
could be named by locals) or they are stack traffic whose cost has to be
compared with the cost of indexed references to locals in the return
stack.  I'd agree that they aren't necessary "juggling" which evokes
permuting stuff in the stack outside the usual FIFO order.  That does
happpen a little bit though, with OVER, ROT, etc.