Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.19

1.18      anton       1: User-visible changes between 0.6.1 and 0.6.2:
                      2: 
1.19    ! anton       3: Bug fixes (in particular, gforth-0.6.2 compiles with gcc-3.3)
        !             4: New words: LATEST, LATESTXT (LASTXT deprecated)
        !             5: Operating environment: Added optional support for a C interface built
        !             6:   on the ffcall libraries (more portable and powerful than the old
        !             7:   one, but still not documented).  To use it, the ffcall libraries
        !             8:   have to be installed before building Gforth (see INSTALL).
        !             9: Miscellaneous: Gforth-fast now uses static superinstructions (some
        !            10:   speedup on some platforms); generally this is transparent (apart
        !            11:   from the speedup), but there are lots of command-line options for
        !            12:   controlling the static superinstruction generation.
1.18      anton      13: 
                     14: 
1.16      anton      15: User-visible changes between 0.6.0 and 0.6.1:
                     16: 
                     17: Bug fixes (installation on big-endian machines sometimes did not work)
                     18: 
                     19: 
1.9       anton      20: User-visible changes between 0.5.0 and 0.6.0:
                     21: 
1.14      anton      22: Changes in behaviour:
1.10      anton      23: 
1.14      anton      24: S": interpreted use now ALLOCATEs the string (they live until BYE).
                     25: Long word names (512MB on 32-bit systems) are now supported (change to
                     26:   the header format).
                     27: New threaded code execution method: primitive-centric (allows the
                     28:   following), hybrid direct/indirect threaded (easier portability),
                     29:   with dynamic superinstructions (typical speedup on Athlon: factor
                     30:   2).  New engine gforth-itc for dealing with some potential
1.16      anton      31:   backwards-compatibility problems (see "Direct or Indirect Threaded?"
                     32:   in the manual).
1.14      anton      33: 
                     34: Operating environment:
                     35: 
                     36: Default dictionary size is now 4MB.
1.10      anton      37: Large file support on OSs that support them (i.e., files with more
                     38:   than 2GB on 32-bit machines).
1.15      anton      39: Gforth can now deal well with broken pipes in most situations.
1.10      anton      40: vi tags files can be built with tags.fs (usage like etags.fs).
1.14      anton      41: gforth.el mostly rewritten.
                     42: New image file format.
1.10      anton      43: 
1.14      anton      44: New words:
1.10      anton      45: 
1.14      anton      46: Keyboard input: EDIT-LINE K-PRIOR K-NEXT K-DELETE
                     47: File input: SLURP-FILE SLURP-FID 
                     48: Programming tools: ID. .ID WORDLIST-WORDS SIMPLE-SEE
                     49: Conditional execution: [DEFINED] [UNDEFINED]
1.17      anton      50: Defining Words: CONST-DOES> ]]
1.14      anton      51: Input stream: PARSE-WORD EXECUTE-PARSING EXECUTE-PARSING-FILE
                     52: String comparison: STR= STR< STRING-PREFIX?
                     53: String literals: S\" .\" \"-PARSE
                     54: Floating point output: F.RDP F>STR-RDP F>BUF-RDP
1.9       anton      55: 
1.14      anton      56: Miscellaneous:
1.9       anton      57: 
                     58: Generalized prims2x.fs into Vmgen (see README.vmgen etc.); used the
                     59:   new capabilities in prims (e.g., automatic handling of the return
                     60:   stack and instruction stream).
1.10      anton      61: 
1.9       anton      62: 
1.8       anton      63: User-visible changes between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0:
                     64: 
                     65: Changes in behaviour:
                     66: 
                     67: There are now two engines: the fast engine (gforth-fast) is at least
                     68:   as fast as gforth in earlier releases; the debugging engine (gforth)
                     69:   supports precise backtracing for signals (e.g., illegal memory
                     70:   access), but is slower by a factor of 1-2.
                     71: Block files now start at block 0 by default (instead of block 1).  If
                     72:   you have block files around, prepend 1024 bytes to convert them, or
                     73:   do a "1 OFFSET !" to establish the old behaviour.
                     74: Gforth now does not translate newlines to LFs on reading.  Instead,
                     75:   READ-LINE now interprets LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines.  Newlines on
                     76:   output are in the OSs favourite format.
                     77: SEE now disassembles primitives (or hex-DUMPs the code if no
                     78:   disassembler is available).
                     79: >HEAD (aka >NAME) now returns 0 (instead of the nt of ???) on failure.
                     80: Syntax of prim changed: stack effects are now surrounded by
                     81:   parentheses, tabs are insignificant.
                     82: 
                     83: Operating environment:
                     84: 
                     85: Gforth now produces a backtrace when catching an exception.
                     86: On platforms supporting the Unix 98 SA_SIGINFO semantics, you get more
                     87:   precise error reports for SIGSEGV and SIGFPE (e.g., "stack
                     88:   underflow" instead of "Invalid memory address").
                     89: Gforth now produces exit code 1 if there is an error (i.e., an
                     90:   uncaught THROW) in batch processing.
                     91: You can use "gforthmi --application ..." to build an image that
                     92:   processes the whole command-line when invoked directly (instead of
                     93:   through gforth -i).
                     94: 
                     95: Ports:
                     96: 
                     97: AIX.
                     98: 20% speedup on 604e under powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu,
                     99: 19%-29% speedup on Celeron with gcc-2.95.
                    100: 
                    101: New words:
                    102: 
                    103: Missing ANS Forth words: EKEY EKEY? EKEY>CHAR
                    104: Timing words: CPUTIME UTIME
                    105: Vector arithmetic: V* FAXPY
                    106: FP comparison: F~ABS F~REL
                    107: Deferred words: <IS> [IS]
                    108: Nested number output: <<# #>>
                    109: Exception handling: TRY RECOVER ENDTRY
                    110: Directory handling: OPEN-DIR READ-DIR CLOSE-DIR FILENAME-MATCH
                    111: Other: ]L PUSH-ORDER
                    112: 
                    113: Miscellaneous:
                    114: 
                    115: Significant extensions to the manual (added an introduction, among
                    116:   other things), many of them due to a new team member: Neal Crook.
                    117: Added assemblers and disassemblers for 386, Alpha, MIPS (thanks to
                    118:   contributions by Andrew McKewan, Bernd Thallner, and Christian
                    119:   Pirker).  Contributions of assemblers and disassemblers for other
                    120:   architectures are welcome.
                    121: 
                    122: 
1.6       anton     123: User-visible changes between 0.3.0 and 0.4.0:
                    124: 
                    125: Operating environment:
                    126: 
                    127: Path handling: "." at the start of the path represents the directory
                    128:   the nearest enclosing file resides in (if there is none: the working
                    129:   directory). "~+" indicates the working directory.  The default path
                    130:   now has "." in front.
                    131: gforth and gforthmi is now more GNU standards compliant (wrt
                    132:   command-line options).
                    133: New command-line-option: --die-on-signal
                    134: Errors are now directed to stderr.
                    135: Stdout is now unbuffered, if it is a tty.
                    136: User input device redirection (for filters) is now possible.
                    137: 
                    138: Ports:
                    139: 
                    140: Now runs on IRIX (and other MIPS-based systems without linker-flag -d).
                    141: Direct threading now works on PowerPC (20% speedup on 604e).
                    142: Better support for m68k (thanks to Andreas Schwab and Jorge Acereda).
                    143: It is possible to create executables that contain the image (for
                    144:   non-OS systems).
1.7       pazsan    145: 
                    146: Added a lot of embedded control (EC) stuff. Supported controllers and
                    147: small CPUs are Siemens C16x, 8086, 6502, Mixed-Mode's FPGA MISC, Bernd Paysan's
                    148: 4stack processor. Not finished: ShBoom alias PSC1000, H8, AVR.
1.6       anton     149: 
                    150: New, changed, and removed words:
                    151: 
                    152: Renamed F0 to FP0 (avoids unexpected behaviour in hex), added aliases
                    153:   SP0, RP0, LP0 (recommended for future use) for S0, R0, L0.
                    154: Renamed PARSE-WORD into SWORD (PARSE-WORD is used with the meaning of
                    155:   NAME in OpenBoot and dpans6 A.6.2.2008)
                    156: Added FPICK (suggested by Julian Noble).
                    157: Added EXCEPTION.
                    158: S" gforth" ENVIRONMENT? now produces the version-string.
                    159: Changed representation of types in struct package, and correspondingly
                    160:   changed names.
                    161: 
                    162: Miscellaneous:
                    163: 
                    164: Plain text documentation is now available in doc/gforth.txt.
                    165: Documentation improvements.
                    166: Wordlist structure changed.
                    167: Added mini-oof.
                    168: Reorganized files: added directories and reorganized many files into
                    169:   them; renamed files into 8.3 format to work with completely broken
                    170:   systems (but there are again some files that won't work there).
                    171: Bug fixes.
                    172: Various changes without log information only known as mega-patches.
1.7       pazsan    173: Cross compiler now also supports compilation only for undefined or forward
                    174: referenced words. Plugins to support some native code generation
                    175: (for PSC1000).
1.6       anton     176: More files in the compat library.
                    177: 
                    178: 
                    179: 
1.5       anton     180: User-visible changes between 0.2.1 and 0.3.0:
                    181: 
                    182: Stack overflow detection by memory protection on most systems
                    183:        (allocation with mmap).
                    184: gforth.fi is now fully relocatable.
                    185: fully relocatable images are now easier to create.
                    186: added primitives K and UNDER+.
                    187: Win32 support.
                    188: Improved support for embedded controllers and other deprived environments.
                    189: some bug fixes.
                    190: added concept index; other documentation improvements.
                    191: 
1.6       anton     192: 
                    193: 
1.5       anton     194: User-visible changes between 0.2.0 and 0.2.1:
1.4       anton     195: 
                    196: Bug fixes
                    197: 
1.6       anton     198: 
                    199: 
1.5       anton     200: User-visible changes between 0.1beta and 0.2.0:
1.1       anton     201: 
1.3       anton     202: Portability and Installation:
                    203: 
1.1       anton     204: Support architectures with buggy long longs (alpha-dec-osf).
1.3       anton     205: Better support for DOS and other non-Unix systems.
1.1       anton     206: Size changes through the command line are passed to the image (and
                    207: saved with savesystem); the preamble specifies an interpreter and is
                    208: propagated by save-system.
1.3       anton     209: 
                    210: Tools:
                    211: 
                    212: Improved etags support.
                    213: more.fs allows output paging.
                    214: Added compat/ directory containing ANS implementations of Gforth features.
                    215: Added tiny multitasker (tasker.fs).
                    216: Added two alternatives for object-oriented programming: oof.fs, objects.fs.
                    217: Added ans-report.fs (reports which words are used from which wordset).
                    218: 
                    219: New words:
                    220: 
                    221: Changed POPEN and PCLOSE to OPEN-PIPE and CLOSE-PIPE.
                    222: Added FORM, ROWS, and COLS.
                    223: added primitives EMIT-FILE, STDOUT, STDERR.
                    224: Added TABLEs (case-sensitive wordlists).
                    225: added POSTPONE,.
                    226: Added the ability to combine arbitrary interpretation and compilation
                    227: semantics (INTERPRET/COMPILE:); state-smart words were generally
                    228: rewritten to use that mechanism.
                    229: 
                    230: Changes to existing words:
                    231: 
                    232: EMIT and TYPE now work through file words (and are redirectable).
1.1       anton     233: HEADER now stores the compilation wordlist in the header and REVEAL
                    234: reveals into that wordlist.
1.3       anton     235: changed behaviour of SYSTEM (no longer returns wretval, but puts it in
                    236: $?)  added (SYSTEM) ( c_addr u -- wretval wior ).
1.1       anton     237: ' and ['] now give an error for compile-only words.
1.3       anton     238: 
1.12      anton     239: -----
1.13      anton     240: Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997,1998,2000,2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1.12      anton     241: 
                    242: This file is part of Gforth.
                    243: 
                    244: Gforth is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
                    245: modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
                    246: as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
                    247: of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
                    248: 
                    249: This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
                    250: but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
                    251: MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.#See the
                    252: GNU General Public License for more details.
                    253: 
                    254: You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
                    255: along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
                    256: Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
                    257: 
1.6       anton     258: 
                    259: % Local Variables:
                    260: % fill-prefix: "  "

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