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From: Duane Rettig <du...@franz.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: why forth over lisp?
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:10:35 -0700 (PDT)
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On Aug 23, 1:19=A0pm, Nick <3-nos...@temporary-address.org.uk> wrote:
> George Neuner <gneun...@comcast.net> writes:
> > Lua 5 still is basically a stack machine - it's a variant of what's
> > generally called a "deep access" stack, in which the machine can
> > access "deep" stack elements directly. =A0Lua's variation does away wit=
h
> > push/pop/etc. top-of-stack instructions.
>
> I find it hard to attach the term "stack" to something that doesn't have
> "push/pop/etc". That is, to me, what makes it a stack rather than some
> other sort of data structure.

Think of a stack as a LIFO (Last In, First Out) queue.  The question
is: what is going in and out?  In this day and age of cache
management, a push/pop of a single natural word (4 or 8 bytes) is
ludicrous for performance, especially when the movement of the stack
pointer is sometimes accompanied by extra checks and/or guard page
faults.  So think of a higher level program which uses activation
frames as a cached stack, which beef up performance in the area of
stack access.  The frames are still layed into memory in LIFO fashion
(with exceptions, of course, like non-local exits and, in some
languages, Continuation Passing Style, but this does not remove the
importance of the stack at the lower level.

Duane