Re: Naming 'n' instances or repetitions

On 24/05/2025 11:50 pm, Ruvim wrote:

On 2025-05-22 07:34, dxf wrote:

I've noticed two ways of naming things 'done n times'.
>
In SwiftForth there is:
>
   (.0) (H.0)
>
which equate to executing '#' 'n' times.
>
It's not clear to me why '0' was used though '0' appears in forth naming
conventions meaning 'initialization'.
>
In VFX Forth (and perhaps others) there is:
>
   NDROP
>
where 'n' indicates number of executions.

 
 
In the word names like `ndrop`, `n>r`, `nr>` I consider `n` as an indicator of the data type on which these words operate.

In the definitions for N>R NR> (I'd forgotten about them) 'n' is plainly a
quantity e.g.

  "Remove n+1 items from the data stack [...]"

...
 
In the word `shold`, `s` could indicate the character string data type, that is ( c-addr u ), but this name does not read very well because of the `sh` phoneme.

But SLITERAL was ok?

Prefixing in forth comes from the days when names were 3 chars plus count.  While
that's no longer so important it is still beneficial to put distinguishing
information first.

SHOLD was developed independently.  Had I known HOLDS existed, I would have been
torn as I had NHOLD to consider.  AFAIK HOLDS was a by-product of the XCHAR proposal.
SHOLD NHOLD were by-products of my floating point output package - which was mostly
an exercise in numeric string manipulation.