Once I got a better idea of Forth, I also realized that Jones stays in assembly for rather long. He builds up the entire interpreter from raw assembly words, because you need the interpreter to start parsing textual Forth source. But you if you could somehow write Forth before the interpreter is put together, it would be quite natural to switch to Forth much earlier. And it turns out you can do that. Jones even defines the `defword` macro. But for some reason he makes very little use of it. Rewriting most of the code leading up to INTERPRET using defword was a fun exercise.

The next step would've been making the whole system bootstrapping by rewriting the assembler in Forth, but x86 machine code generation is hairy enough that I bailed out at this point.

It's an excellent codebase; thank you very much! I've changed the design a slight bit so far -- but the vague signature of jonesforth is really still there, I think!

Thanks!