Verb Specification

We need a way to permit the user to specify a single verb. This is tricky business because that verb specification brings us into variable factors. After all, we don't know when we build the software just how many verbs the user will build. So what to do?

One consideration is that we do specify the upper limit on the number of verbs; we could simply assume that upper limit.

Clearly, the verb number will have to be folded into the token. We have several ways to do this. First is setting aside some portion of the address space of the tokens for the verbs. This would permit contiguity of tokens, but would then be clumsy if we needed to edit the token list. The second way is to assign the top 3 bits of the token to an identifier that indicates what the remainder of the token contains.

I just found a major problem with this: the RAM requirements. A single token entry consumes 200 bytes. To add a thousand verb tokens would cost 200K of RAM. The only way around this is to do it the same way that I handle constants: use a prefix token and then have special-case handling. How messy would this be? There are six cases in the code where I special-case the use of constants; presumably I would have to do the same thing here.

OK, let's do it.