1.1 Stability Goals

Programs that work on earlier versions of Gforth should also work on newer versions. However, there are some caveats:

Internal data structures (including the representation of code) of Gforth may change between versions, unless they are documented.

Moreover, we only feel obliged to keep standard words (i.e., with standard wordset names) and words documented as permanent Gforth extensions (with wordset name gforth or gforth-<version>, see Notation). Other words may be removed in newer releases.

In particular, you may find a word by using locate or otherwise inspecting Gforth’s source code. You can see the wordset in a comment right after the stack-effect comment. If there is no wordset for a word, it is an internal factor and may be removed in a future version. If the wordset is gforth-experimental, gforth-internal, or gforth-obsolete, the word may also be removed in a future version.

If you want to use a particular word that is not marked as permanent, please let us know, and we will consider to add the word as permanent word (or we may suggest an alternative to using this word).