Thoughts on extending the code

We have looked at the inner loop and a few basic commands of a Forth system. We could extend this system on this level with more machine build words or hand-crafted higher-level routines. But what we actually want is tooling that eases the building of these words.

To be able to do that we need two more things:

• ways to handle a dictionary
• and a command line for input and output

We will implement the handling of the dicitionary first.

The dictionary is a linked list of words in the following format:

    ▲                                   
    │                                   
 ┌──┴───┬───┬───┬───┬──────────────────---
 │ LINK │ 2 │ s │ q │ (definition ...) 
 └──▲───┴───┴───┴───┴──────────────────---
    │                                  
 LATEST                                 

How to implement this will be described in future posts.