I would like to see some real-world examples too.

Not in any particular order, and certainly not complete, but:

• portability: Retro runs on a tiny, easy to implement virtual machine, which allows any non-host dependent code to work across systems. As such, it runs on bare x86 hardware, or under an
• uses a somewhat literate source format with code blocks, test blocks, and commentary, typically written in a Markdown subset
• the language uses prefixes/sigils to denote actions for tokens (similar to colors in colorforth)
• word behaviour at compile/interpret time grouped into classes (an idea borrowed from helforth)
• more packaged data structures (arrays, strings, etc) in the core language
• flat namespace, using short prefixes to group related words
• extensive use of quotations and combinators
• no forward parsing of input stream
• it’s used daily for a variety of real-world, non-embedded, tasks (I use Retro to implement significant parts of a browser-based application my employer uses for order management, in addition to running tools written in it for many of my own purposes)
• documentation: I find most Forths to be lacking on this front, so I try to provide useful documentation, and work to continually improve on it based on feedback I receive.

The big differences are:

• There are no only a few “immediate” words, a concept which can be confusing to newcomers
• There are no “parsing words”, words that operate on the entire buffer of text input. You can do some cool stuff with parsing words, but I always felt like it was too much power and made it hard to read other people’s code.
• Forth and Retro are both untyped (not to be confused with dynamically typed), which is a big change for most newcomers. In Retro, you get more syntax than a normal Forth for dealing with different types of data. In regular Forth, everything is either a number or a dictionary entry. Retro adds “word classes” so that numbers start with #, strings start with ', chars start with $, etc…
• Retro does not have the historic baggage that Forth might have, since Forth was invented in 1969. A lot of Forth systems will still make reference to things like “blocks”. Although a lot of devs like working with blocks, I feel like they are just a remnant of the past, given that few people work on machines that have decent filesystem support in 2021.
• Retro also uses quotations in a way that is different than traditional Forths, though I do believe quotations were added to Forth in the last 10 years.

I write more Retro than Forth. No hard feelings if someone reading this wants to fact check me.