Quote:
Somehow I got wrapped around the idea that for it to be a Forth, it had to be Forth-83 compliant, or even ans-compliant. And that meant having BLOCK work just like in Leo Brodie's "Starting Forth" book
Keep in mind that there are embedded Forth applications running from ROM, with no mass storage of any kind, and even compiled with headerless code so they can't look anything up in a dictionary, and in that case you can also remove FIND : , C, CREATE ALLOT and so on.
My workbench computer has very little human I/O, and, although it can read and write serial EEPROMs and large serial flash memories, it really has no file system built in. All program material I load into it comes to it as source code over an RS-232 line from the PC (or other host), and it compiles, assembles, or interprets, as appropriate, on the fly, as the source code is coming in. The PC just thinks it's printing the material to an old serial printer with no graphics capability. The workbench computer has Forth-83 in EPROM (with additions I have chosen from many sources) but it doesn't know what a block is. I formed the Forth on the PC and programmed it into the EPROM, including the Forth assembler.