Quick Forth Question

[Tony Duell]

> That's odd.
> 
> Usually ." Hello, world." words on all forths.


Watch out. In some Forths, ." can only be used inside a colon definition, 
not in the imput like (you get some very odd effects, possibly even a 
crash if you try). I used to know the reason for this, something about it 
needing to allocate space for the string.

At least one Forth used " rather than ." too.

> 
> Keep in mind you do need the space between ." and the first letter of
> the string, since ." is a word (a "parsing" word since it reads ahead in
> the stream till the ending ") 

But there does not need to be a space before the closing quote (if there 
is one, it will be output as part of the string)

> Might help. Sometimes you can also type WORDS at the command prompt and
> see all the words.


VLIST (stands for Vocabulary List) is another word some FORTHs use for this.

-tony