Stack-based programming does not need extra syntax characters (what you call quotes and brackets) to structure the program. arithmetic syntax: (a+b)*c lis

Stack-based programming does not need extra syntax characters (what you call quotes and brackets) to structure the program. arithmetic syntax: (a+b)*c lisp syntax (polish notation): (* (+ a b) c) forth syntax (reverse polish notation): a b + c * In fact all words in Forth are only separated by whitespace. However, to "emulate" more complex syntax, some words in Forth are marked to be executed immediately upon parsing (somewhat like "macros" in lisp) and then access the input stream to extract more than whitespace-separated tokens. Exampes: '(' parses comments : ( comment) 's"' compiles string literals : s" abc" '[if]' conditionally skips code fragments: 0 [IF] bla [THEN] Still the macro word itelsf needs to be whitespace-delimited.