Pabst Blue Ribbon  writes:
>Gareth's Downstairs Computer
> wrote:
>>
>> With oodles (Soon to be tera-oodles?) of RAM available
>> on the RPi3, and in future releases likely to be even more,
>> is there any point to continuing to cater for bytes, halfwords
>> and words, when everything, including CHAR, can be a 64 bit
>> quantity?
>
>If I remember correctly, CHAR is specifically restricted to 8 bit in Forth
>language specification, to keep compatibility with other  Forths. CELL is
>64 bit on 64 bit machines, 32 bit on 32 bit machines, etc.

You don't remember correctly.  The character size is at least 8 bits.
Forth-94 and Forth-2012 even allowed 1 chars > 1, but the next
standard requires 1 chars = 1.  The OP's suggested system could be
compatible with the next standard by having a 64-bit address unit.  I
think that 64-bit chars on byte-addressed machines are a bad idea,
though.  They don't solve a problem, and cause various compatibility
and performance problems.

Followups set to comp.lang.forth.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
     New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
   EuroForth 2018: http://www.euroforth.org/ef18/

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