Among random "better safe than sorry" changes, the real fix is in
changing "4" for "5" above _find declaration. This off-by-one error
had that word, which is the root word in z80, have a 0x01 prev field
instead of a 0x00 one.
When all memory was initialized to zero, it didn't matter, we ended
up hitting 0 prev and considered ourselves properly at the end of
dict.
When memory wasn't initialized, however, we would end up jumping at
all kinds of places, leading to random behavior.
Initially, I used the same letters as those used in the z80 ref
docs, but it makes the different assemblers harder to use than they
should. Having consistent "argtype" rules across assemblers should
help.
I'm not sure why I chose null-terminated initially. Probably because
the z80asm version had null-terminated strings.
Length-prefixes strings are the traditional form of strings in Forth
and it's a bit easier to work with them with traditional forth words
when they're under this form.
Virgil Dupras