Gforth Manual
More precisely, they have no interpretation
semantics (see section Interpretation and Compilation Semantics)
In compiler
construction terminology, all places dominated by the definition of the
local.
In
standard terminology, "appends to the current definition".
In
standard terminology: The default interpretation semantics are its
execution semantics; the default compilation semantics are to append its
execution semantics to the execution semantics of the current
definition.
In my opinion, though, you should think thrice before
using a doubly-linked list (whatever implementation).
Unfortunately, long longs are not implemented
properly on all machines (e.g., on alpha-osf1, long longs are only 64
bits, the same size as longs (and pointers), but they should be twice as
long according to section `Double-Word Integers' in GNU C Manual). So, we had to implement doubles in C after all. Still, on
most machines we can use long longs and achieve better performance than
with the emulation package.
We use a one-stack notation, even
though we have separate data and floating-point stacks; The separate
notation can be generated easily from the unified notation.