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

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

...Moore has never changed his position, switched his tune, introduced
locals and mega-compilers - as the latter do today in an attempt to
maintain the interest, maintain a following.

Weren't we just quibbling about small (few percent) efficency
differences between using locals and using stack words?  You get far
greater efficiency gains by using optimizing compilers.  If you feel
like the optimizing compiler is needless bloat and want to use an
interpreter instead, that's fine, it just means that (like most of us),
you've found that code speed isn't that important for whatever you're
doing.  Stephen Pelc posted a few days ago that in the past decade, his
customers have stopped asking for faster code.

I think that is a better takeaway than "well we can give up the
optimizing compiler, because using stack words instead of locals
recovers a few percent of the lost speed".