"In Forth, the ideal size of a procedure is about a line, and procedures that take more than three arguments are considered a "code smell" that suggests a diffe

"In Forth, the ideal size of a procedure is about a line, and procedures that take more than three arguments are considered a "code smell" that suggests a different factoring might be more appropriate." That might be the ideal, but if you take a look at real-world Forth code, most of it is much longer than the ideal. There are a couple of other things that help readability in Forth. One is thorough commenting, and the other is the use of intermediate variables. Unfortunately, real-world Forth code often doesn't have much of either -- intermediate variables are often frowned upon as being "un-Forthish", and thorough commenting results in a program that is so verbose that (except for the embedded domain) you might as well have written your code in a more conventional language in the first place.