Forth words can alter the interpretation of subsequent characters in the input stream. The word \ consumes any characters between itself and a newline- it's one

Forth words can alter the interpretation of subsequent characters in the input stream. The word \ consumes any characters between itself and a newline- it's one way of providing inline comments. The word s" consumes characters up to a terminating ", providing one kind of string literal. Parsing Forth, by design, is connected to both compiling and interpreting Forth. The intertwined semantics and syntax of Forth seem sufficiently different from most languages to justify different terminology.