Introduction

The core API documentation in this section provides a description of all the core API words intended for use by upper layer programs. This documentation uses a certain convention for describing a word, which is very common in the Forth world: the stack effect diagram. One departure from common practice is that each element found or placed on the stack is not written according to its type, but named according to its purpose / function.

A stack effect diagram shows a picture of what should be on the stack when the word is executed, and also shows what remains on the stack after it completes. For example, the word dup, which duplicates an item on the stack would be described as follows:

dup ( item -- item item )

The rest of this section is organized topically. The words found documented here are all defined either in the core dictionary packaged with the compiler shellcode or in the file api/core.fth.