[ED: in the comp.lang.forth, not this this newsgroup!]

[ED: ....for large and/or complex and/or
not embedded applications.]

TTFN,
      Tarkin

It is not true that ANY such system will look the same, but it is true
that there are only so many ways to skin a cat.  When building a
portable virtual machine, you don't know how many registers will be
available.  It's silly to just pick a number.  The result will be code
that's optimized for a platform that doesn't really exist, and which
requires extra work and complexity to translate into a real machine.  
There are basically two choices for a portable virtual machine: first,
model it as an infinite register machine and leave the VM to do spilling
onto the stack based on the number of actual registers on the target
hardware; or second, model it as a zero-register machine, in which all
operations are inherently stack-based, and leave the VM to handle
caching some stack slots into registers when possible.

So this "Forth-like" (by which I assume you mean stack-based)
architecture is one of two options.  I tend to prefer the other option,
but either makes for feasible implementations.

If you're referring to some other similarity to Forth, then you might
want to be clearer about what it is.