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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Avoid treating the stack as an array [Re: "Back & Forth" is back!]
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 03:38:51 -0700
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dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:
>>> "I remain adamant that local variables  are not only useless, they
>>> are harmful. If you are writing code that needs  them you are
>>> writing, non-optimal code" - Chuck Moore 1999 ...
>
> Claims made in respect of locals in forth - ease of use, better
> performance through less 'stack juggling', better
> readability/maintainability - were all made in the 1980's.  What has
> changed?  Forthers today are more willing to believe, to accept the
> word of authority, lack the interest to discover the truth for
> themselves?  

Is avoiding locals because of the Chuck Moore quote not an example of
accepting the word of authority?  And how often do even you care whether
your code is optimal?  It's likely difficult to get any interpreted
Forth code to run at better than 1/5th the speed of assembly code.  So
if optimization is your main concern, why use Forth to begin with?

I would say that the claim of better performance from locals depends on
the implementation and in any case has to be scrutinized if it matters,
but even if there's a performance loss, that might be an acceptable
trade if the programmer finds offsetting gains in the other areas.

My main programming language for random hacking is Python, which is
possibly 10x slower than interpreted Forth or 50x slower than compiled
Forth or C.  Yet it usually doesn't matter unless I'm trying to do
something unusually compute intensive.  Once the program is fast enough
to not be annoying to use, I don't need to optimize it more.