On Tue, Jan 2, 2024 at 3:49 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

Perhaps the feeling is that that is what FORTH was; for that I
guess I don't see any reason one couldn't transpile to FORTH from some
other language.

Henry Baker wrote a beautiful little paper (see https://www.plover.com/~mjd/misc/hbaker-archive/ForthStack.html>) showing the mapping between Linear Lisp (a Lisp in which all variables are referenced once and only once) and a Forth-style "frameless stack".  There is also a discussion of Forth as a set of linear combinators: Manfred von Thun's Joy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)> is a Forth-like using nested lists in which the stack is the top-level list.