Doug Coleman <[email protected]> wrote:
> In your book, you state that you know about the */ word in Forth,
> allowing you to quickly solve the resistor problem.  Why not go the
> whole hog and ship a new word in every Forth implementation:
> : *+/ ( x y -- z ) 2dup + */ ;

Doug, I see your purpose and appreciate it; I think you explained well
why Factor separates data flow from operators. However, Forth's */
operator has one additional purpose; it's really merely to be able to
avoid typing a space between star and slash. It's actually a scaling
operator which uses a double-length intermediate result, so that as
long as your final answer fits into a single-length integer, there
will be no overflow. In Forth, at that time, that's a very significant
guarantee.

Factor doesn't need that; it has other ways to avoid integer overflow.

-Wm

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