Comments better reflect wordsize
Comments better reflect wordsize

Which is an issue that is annoying me.

muforth is now 64-bit, so "cell" on the host means 64 bits. Great.

But for cross-compiling to microcontrollers, all kinds of wordsizes come
into play. So what do you call these groups of bytes? ARM would have us
say

  byte          8 bits
  halfword     16 bits
  word         32 bits

and this suggests - as makes some sense to a company that has only made,
until recently, 32-bit machines - that the 32-bit word has a kind of
privileged status. Halfwords are like half-men. And they have issues.

But on an 8-bit processor, "word" should mean 16 bits, shouldn't it?

But word also has another meaning in Forth, which adds another layer of
confusion.

There need to be entirely neutral terms for these, just as the internet
folks started using "octet" instead of "byte" to talk about 8 bits going
down a wire, in case they were talking about software running on some
kind of odd machine with 9-bit bytes...

Greek: mono, bi, tetra (what about 8?)
Latin: uni duo quadra octo

And what about signed and unsigned? It's something to think about...

nickhen/muforth,nickhen/muforth