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

Jan Coombs <jan4comp.lang.forth@murray-microft.co.uk> writes:

Absolutely.  As Chucks prime target of interest (hardware) uses LIFO
registers for stacks, only the top top one, or so, R stack items could
be used for restricted local storage (which is also common practice).
>
I accept that locals are useful, and would like to see hardware stack
engine implementations that support this better while retaining the
performance advantage of a stack cache implemented as LIFO registers
rather than in RAM.

AFAIK Chuck Moore implements the stack as SRAM indexed with his stack
pointer; maybe the stack pointer is a rotating shift register with
only one bit set, don't remember.

He also uses an A register in addition to R and the data TOS last I
looked.  So much for Chuck Moore denouncing registers.  When he
introduced A, some people played with the idea to add A and possibly
more registers to Forth.

- anton
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