Stack effects

While Forth has no type system, it is convention to describe the stack effect of words in comments. You will find these stack effects throughout the code base and in the documentation.

The comments follow the ( in -- out ) format, with the rightmost value being the top of the parameter stack. To make it more clear what values you can expect, the following symbols are used:

• c - Character (byte)
• x - Cell (2 bytes)
• n - Signed integer
• u - Unsigned integer
• f - Boolean flag (true or false)
• c-addr Char-aligned address
• a-addr Cell-aligned address
• xt - Execution token (address of a word)

In some cases, symbols are followed by a number, for example nip has the stack effect ( x1 x2 -- x2 ) to make it clear that not the top of the stack is dropped, but the second value on the stack. Without this addition, it would be indistinguishable from drop, which has the effect ( x -- ).