@TomF i find forth hard to adjust to, but— in order to write WAST, you have to adjust to it? so once you've adjusted to it, why go back and forth? maybe the person on the standards committee who got the LISP mode in actually does write WAST code where all stackiness is done via "unrolling". but, i found myself writing code like

global.get $var ;; return value

local.tee $v2
global.get $var
i32.mul
local.get $v2
i32.add
global.set $var

;; end of function

you can't LISP that!!