forth is one of those languages where building the interpreter teaches you more about computing than using it ever will. the key insight is how simple the execution model actually is - a stack, a dictionary of words, and an inner interpreter thats maybe 20 lines of C. everything else is built on top of that.

if anyone wants to go deeper after this challenge, jonesforth (https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth) is a fully bootstrapping forth in x86 assembly with excellent literate comments that walk you through every design decision. you end up understanding how a language can be built from nothing but a handful of machine instructions.