Programs that work on earlier versions of Gforth should also work on newer versions. However, there are some caveats:
Internal data structures (including the representation of code) of Gforth may change between versions, unless they are documented.
Moreover, we only feel obliged to keep standard words (i.e., with
standard wordset names) and words documented as stable Gforth
extensions (with wordset name gforth or
gforth-<version>, see Notation). Other words may be
removed in newer releases.
In particular, you may find a word by using locate or otherwise
inspecting Gforth’s source code. You can see the wordset in a comment
right after the stack-effect comment. E.g., in
: execute-parsing ( ... addr u xt -- ... ) \ gforth
the wordset is gforth.
If there is no wordset for a word, it is an internal factor and may be
removed in a future version. If the wordset is
gforth-experimental, gforth-internal, or
gforth-obsolete, the word may also be removed in a future
version. In particular, gforth-experimental indicates that
this is a supported word that we do not consider stable yet;
gforth-obsolete indicates an intent to remove the word in the
next version; and gforth-internal (or no wordset) indicates
that we may remove the word as soon as we no longer use it in Gforth.
If you want to use a particular word that is not marked as stable, please let us know, and we will consider to add the word as stable word (or we may suggest an alternative to using this word).