2026-07-25 11:42:12 <veltas      > lofty: Wordlists are a total mess unfortunately
2026-07-25 11:43:01 <veltas      > It's a good idea but the standardisation broke down trying to reconcile different behavior while keeping it flexible
2026-07-25 11:44:14 <veltas      > What are you trying to achieve in particular?
2026-07-25 11:46:17 <veltas      > I'm currently working on a Forth dialect and think I'll support wordlists as a namespace mechanism, will allow hiding the global namespace too like normal Forth allows with ONLY etc
2026-07-25 12:48:47 <lofty       > What are you trying to achieve in particular? <-- cmForth-like "machine code generating words shadow standard words when compiling a definition"
2026-07-25 18:22:04 <lofty       > something I always struggle with is when magic numbers are okay in code
2026-07-25 22:13:54 <lofty       > crc: thanks for the handy reference, by the way, I think I have the rough idea of it (and my code works, which also helps demonstrate understanding)
2026-07-25 22:45:55 <veltas      > Magic numbers are never okay, the trick is knowing the difference between a non-magic and magic number
2026-07-25 22:47:54 <veltas      > Like  : STAR 42 EMIT ;  42 is not a magic number, not in my opinion.
2026-07-25 22:56:21 <veltas      > Although I wouldn't write it that way in new Forth because [CHAR] etc exists
2026-07-25 22:58:40 <xentrac     > it might not be improved by 42 constant asterisk  : star asterisk emit ; in a world without [char] which was ascii in Forth-79 IIRC
2026-07-25 22:59:28 <xentrac     > but at some point you might want to << ... asterisk hold ... >>
2026-07-25 22:59:55 <xentrac     > ugh
2026-07-25 23:00:04 <xentrac     > but at some point you might want to <# ... asterisk hold ... #>
2026-07-25 23:00:33 <veltas      > YAGNI
2026-07-25 23:00:56 <xentrac     > right, I mean, you could do the refactoring at that point
2026-07-25 23:01:16 <xentrac     > or it might be better to write <# ... 42 hold ... #> instead
2026-07-25 23:01:54 <veltas      > I mean like when would you put a star in a formatted number
2026-07-25 23:02:36 <xentrac     > I've seen fields where the width of the field is filled up with asterisks
2026-07-25 23:04:32 <veltas      > Aside from padding zeros <# #> stuff isn't that good at padding
2026-07-25 23:04:57 <xentrac     > the reason it might be better to write 42 hold is that when you're debugging it's very improbable that someone has defined 42 as 52 or 15 or something
2026-07-25 23:05:14 <xentrac     > whereas that's totally plausible with asterisk hold
2026-07-25 23:07:50 <xentrac     > 15 was a sort of asterisk in CP437
2026-07-25 23:28:51 <cleobuli_   > i'm writing a clone of hypercard
2026-07-25 23:29:12 <cleobuli_   > https://github.com/cleobuline/hc