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M.A. Ertl:
"STATE - Why it is Evil and How to Exorcise it";
in: "14th euroFORTH conference on the FORTH Programming Language", issued by: International Centre for Informatics; Eigenverlag, Dagstuhl, 1998, 1 - 8.

State-smart words provide a number of unpleasant surprises to their users. They are applied in two contexts, and they fail in both: 1) for providing an arbitrary combination of interpretation and compilation semantics; 2) for optimization with a special implementation of the (default) compilation semantics. This paper discusses these issues and shows programmers and system implementors how to avoid state-smart words. It also reports our experiences in coverting the state-smart words in Gforth into a clean solution: little work and few problems.

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/