DISFAVORED Was: name for 3 PICK finally?

Andrew Haley <andrew29@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> We'd certainly spend a lot of time discussing what ahould be
> DISFAVOURED.  Top of my personal list would be STATE, then ROLL, then
> PICK...

Since we've started that discussion, I'd nominate IMMEDIATE . It isn't
that often that you want the same word to do the same thing whether
compiling or interpreting. If you want it to do different things then
instead of using STATE it might as well be two words.

In terms of traditional implementations, if you get rid of the immediate
header bit then as Bruce pointed out you have 8 categories available.
HOST COMPILER TARGET etc could fit in there, or others. 

I wouldn't mind having a MACRO: category built into the compiler. If you
can do 

MACRO: TIF DUP IF DROP ;

then you don't actually need to compile IF into another word, and IF can
be execute-only. No need for [COMPILE] POSTPONE etc. You never need to
compile an execute-only word into a definition -- the definition can
execute it by executing the macro.

That might seem like overkill to put it into the interpreter/compiler,
but how often would we use macros compared to building immediate words
that do the same thing interpreting and compiling? Even if you don't put
it into the compiler, MACRO: can replace a small pile of machinery that
we've argued about at great length. It isn't nearly as efficient -- it
requires the parser and dictionary lookup. And unless you choose short
wordnames it takes more space. (Even a count+3chars needs a space after
it making 5 chars, where an execution token will usually be 2 or 4
bytes, or possibly 5 bytes for a subroutine-threaded system.) But if
your system is so small that the length of your macros is a big issue,
you probably won't be doing a lot of fancy compiling on it. And if the
time to compile macros is a big issue then you can solve it
under-the-hood.

If we could get rid of STATE IMMEDIATE [COMPILE] POSTPONE and have
COMPILE-ONLY EXECUTE-ONLY and MACRO: to partly replace them, I think
we'd come out ahead. Not counting the amount of discussion required.