Confusing words

..................WTF?! YOU DONT KNOW WHAT IS "XRUMER"?!

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meldels
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Confusing words

Post by meldels »

"After his initial success with an ALGOL based interpreter at MIT and Stanford, Moore
moved on to work with Burroughs equipment. This hardware was strongly oriented
around a stack. This influenced the further development of Forth. Implementations were
written in BALGOL, COBOL and SBOL (the Burroughs Systems Programming
Language). These provided manipulation words for the stack: DROP, DUP, SWAP, etc.
which are still found in modern Forth systems. The first true Forth system which
resembled what we now perceive as Forth was then created by Moore on an IBM 1130.
The word size of this machine limited the users to having names of not more than five
characters. Had it not been for this IBM limitation the name `Forth' would have been
`Fourth' - standing for Fourth Generation Language."

Could someone explain better to me what the boldened words/phrases mean in this context? Is it anything like:

Code: Select all

IF [STATEMENT]
{
  IF [STATEMENT]
  {
  }
  ELSE IF [STATEMENT]
  {
       IF [STATEMENT]
       {
       }
  }
}
As in the stacking of statements. And if so I think they could've worded this better.
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Saxxon
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Re: Confusing words

Post by Saxxon »

A stack is a programming concept. It is a set of data that grows and shrinks from use. It works like this:

* When you put something on the stack, it goes on the end. This is a PUSH.
* When you take something from the stack, it's taken from the end. This is a POP.

This is how a stack is intended to be used. Programs utilize a stack when they need to hold on to a variable temporarily (to be popped later) or when they need to send parameters to a subroutine.

Edit: I realize that these actions aren't always necessarily at the end, but I won't go into stack pointers here.
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meldels
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Re: Confusing words

Post by meldels »

Oh thank you, all these tutorials I look at never have explanations for the words they think I should know.
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