Yes, in my own toy concatenative language, define is just a regular procedure. It takes two arguments off the stack. The first is a pointer to the name, the second is a pointer to a quotation with the definition body. It intentionally looks Forth-like but it's different under the hood:

    [ dup + ]      \ writes a lambda function to heap and push ptr
      : double ;   \ : writes the next symbol as a string to heap and push ptr
                   \ ; is define, writes definition into dict

The reason Forth did it the classic Forth way originally, I suspect, is because Forth's parser needs to be told to switch modes. Stop executing words directly and start compiling them. There isn't really anywhere to store a temporary string, so you need to tell it to start writing into the dictionary entry before you give it the string. In my language, using [ ] for quotations starts writing to the heap, which is also where strings go. This has the same practical effect.

I agree in principle about the benefits of everything being uniform. For Stabel, specifically, I need some way of seperating function-definition from function-implementation, and a prefix meta language seemed like the best bet. Didn't look at it too closely, though.

Thanks and, nice work with Stabel, we need more experiments in this space.