Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.28
1.20 anton 1:
2:
1.28 ! anton 3: User-visible changes between 0.6.2 and 0.6.9 (up to 2008-07-15):
1.20 anton 4:
1.28 ! anton 5: Requirements:
! 6: At run-time requires libtool and gcc (for libcc C interface) and
! 7: gdb (for disassembler (SEE) on some platforms).
1.20 anton 8: Installation:
9: support for DESTDIR, POST_INSTALL, INSTALL_SCRIPT
1.28 ! anton 10: automatic performance tuning on building (--enable-force-reg unnecessary)
! 11: report performance and functionality problems at end of "make"
! 12: autogen.sh now exists
! 13: License:
! 14: Changed to GPLv3
1.20 anton 15: Bug fixes
1.22 anton 16: Now works with address-space randomization.
1.20 anton 17: The single-step debugger works again in some engines.
1.22 anton 18: Many others.
1.20 anton 19: Ports:
20: AMD64, ARM, IA-64 (Itanium): better performance
1.22 anton 21: PPC: disassembler and assembler (32-bit)
1.28 ! anton 22: Gforth EC: R8C, Lego NXT (not distributed; complete?)
! 23: MacOS X: better support
1.22 anton 24: Invocation:
25: New flags --ignore-async-signals, --vm-commit (default overcommit)
1.28 ! anton 26: --print-sequences
1.20 anton 27: Forth 200x:
28: extension queries (produce true for all implemented extensions)
29: REQUIRED etc. (not new)
30: [DEFINED] and [UNDEFINED]
31: PARSE-NAME (new name)
32: deferred words (new: DEFER@ DEFER! ACTION-OF)
1.24 anton 33: X:structures: +FIELD FIELD: FFIELD: CFIELD: etc.
1.25 anton 34: X:ekeys: new: EKEY>FKEY K-SHIFT-MASK K-CTRL-MASK K-ALT-MASK K-F1...K-F12
1.28 ! anton 35: Unicode support (currently supports only uniform encoding):
1.20 anton 36: added xchars words for dealing with variable-width multi-byte characters
37: provide 8bit (ISO Latin 1) and UTF-8 support for xchars
38: Number prefixes:
39: 0x is a hex prefix: 0xff and 0XfF now produces (decimal) 255
40: # is a decimal prefix: #10 now produces (decimal) 10
1.24 anton 41: Signs after the number prefix are now accepted, e.g, #-50.
1.20 anton 42: ' now only handles a single (x)char: 'ab is no longer accepted,
43: 'a' now produces (decimal) 97
44: New words:
1.28 ! anton 45: \C C-FUNCTION C-LIBRARY END-C-LIBRARY C-LIBRARY-NAME (libcc C interface)
! 46: LIB-ERROR (complements OPEN-LIB)
1.22 anton 47: OUTFILE-EXECUTE INFILE-EXECUTE BASE-EXECUTE (limited change of global state)
48: 16-bit and 32-bit memory acces: UW@ UL@ SW@ SL@ W! L! W@ L@ /W /L
49: NEXT-ARG SHIFT-ARGS (OS command-line argument processing)
50: NOTHROW (for backtrace control)
1.20 anton 51: FTRUNC FMOD (undocumented)
1.24 anton 52: SEE-CODE SEE-CODE-RANGE (show generated dynamic native code)
1.22 anton 53: Improvements/changes of existing words:
1.25 anton 54: S\", .\" now support \l, \m, \z, and limits hex and octal character specs.
55: OPEN-FILE with W/O no longer creates or truncates files (no compat. file)
1.28 ! anton 56: OPEN-LIB now understands ~ at the start, like OPEN-FILE.
1.22 anton 57: TRY...ENDTRY changed significantly, compatibility files available (see docs).
58: The disassembler (DISCODE) can now use gdb to disassemble code
59: Uninitialized defered words now give a warning when executed
60: Division is floored (disable with "configure --enable-force-cdiv")
61: Gforth (not gforth-fast) reports division by zero and overflow on division
62: on all platforms.
1.20 anton 63: Newly documented words:
64: S>NUMBER? S>UNUMBER?
1.25 anton 65: EKEY keypress names: K-LEFT K-RIGHT K-UP K-DOWN K-HOME K-END K-PRIOR
66: K-NEXT K-INSERT K-DELETE
1.20 anton 67: CLEARSTACKS
1.22 anton 68: FORM
1.20 anton 69: Environment variable GFORTHSYSTEMPREFIX (used by word SYSTEM and friends)
70: C interface:
71: exported symbols now start with "gforth_" (for referencing them from C code)
1.28 ! anton 72: libcc C function call interface (requires libtool and gcc at run-time)
! 73: alternative: undocumented libffi-based interface
1.20 anton 74: Libraries:
75: depth-changes.fs: report stack depth changes during interpretation
1.22 anton 76: ans-report.fs now reports CfV extensions
1.20 anton 77: fsl-util.4th: FSL support files (undocumented)
78: regexp.fs for regular expressions (undocumented)
79: complex.fs for complex numbers (undocumented)
80: fft.fs for Fast Fourier Transform (undocumented)
81: wf.fs, a Wiki implementation (undocumented)
82: httpd.fs, a web server (undocumented)
83: status.fs, show interpreter status in separate xterm (undocumented)
84: profile.fs for profiling (undocumented, incomplete)
1.22 anton 85: endtry-iferror.fs, recover-endtry.fs to ease the TRY change transition
1.24 anton 86: test/tester.fs: Now works with FP numbers (undocumented)
87: test/ttester.fs: Version of tester.fs with improved interface (T{...}T).
1.20 anton 88: compat library:
89: compat/execute-parsing.fs
90: Speed improvements:
1.28 ! anton 91: automatic performance tuning on building
1.20 anton 92: static stack caching (good speedup on PPC)
1.22 anton 93: mixed-precision division is now faster
1.20 anton 94: support for int128 types on AMD64
95: workarounds for gcc performance bugs (in particular, PR 15242)
1.24 anton 96: branch target alignment (good speedup on Alpha).
1.20 anton 97:
98:
1.18 anton 99: User-visible changes between 0.6.1 and 0.6.2:
100:
1.19 anton 101: Bug fixes (in particular, gforth-0.6.2 compiles with gcc-3.3)
102: New words: LATEST, LATESTXT (LASTXT deprecated)
103: Operating environment: Added optional support for a C interface built
104: on the ffcall libraries (more portable and powerful than the old
105: one, but still not documented). To use it, the ffcall libraries
106: have to be installed before building Gforth (see INSTALL).
107: Miscellaneous: Gforth-fast now uses static superinstructions (some
108: speedup on some platforms); generally this is transparent (apart
109: from the speedup), but there are lots of command-line options for
110: controlling the static superinstruction generation.
1.18 anton 111:
112:
1.16 anton 113: User-visible changes between 0.6.0 and 0.6.1:
114:
115: Bug fixes (installation on big-endian machines sometimes did not work)
116:
117:
1.9 anton 118: User-visible changes between 0.5.0 and 0.6.0:
119:
1.14 anton 120: Changes in behaviour:
1.10 anton 121:
1.14 anton 122: S": interpreted use now ALLOCATEs the string (they live until BYE).
123: Long word names (512MB on 32-bit systems) are now supported (change to
124: the header format).
125: New threaded code execution method: primitive-centric (allows the
126: following), hybrid direct/indirect threaded (easier portability),
127: with dynamic superinstructions (typical speedup on Athlon: factor
128: 2). New engine gforth-itc for dealing with some potential
1.16 anton 129: backwards-compatibility problems (see "Direct or Indirect Threaded?"
130: in the manual).
1.14 anton 131:
132: Operating environment:
133:
134: Default dictionary size is now 4MB.
1.10 anton 135: Large file support on OSs that support them (i.e., files with more
136: than 2GB on 32-bit machines).
1.15 anton 137: Gforth can now deal well with broken pipes in most situations.
1.10 anton 138: vi tags files can be built with tags.fs (usage like etags.fs).
1.14 anton 139: gforth.el mostly rewritten.
140: New image file format.
1.10 anton 141:
1.14 anton 142: New words:
1.10 anton 143:
1.14 anton 144: Keyboard input: EDIT-LINE K-PRIOR K-NEXT K-DELETE
145: File input: SLURP-FILE SLURP-FID
146: Programming tools: ID. .ID WORDLIST-WORDS SIMPLE-SEE
147: Conditional execution: [DEFINED] [UNDEFINED]
1.17 anton 148: Defining Words: CONST-DOES> ]]
1.14 anton 149: Input stream: PARSE-WORD EXECUTE-PARSING EXECUTE-PARSING-FILE
150: String comparison: STR= STR< STRING-PREFIX?
151: String literals: S\" .\" \"-PARSE
152: Floating point output: F.RDP F>STR-RDP F>BUF-RDP
1.9 anton 153:
1.14 anton 154: Miscellaneous:
1.9 anton 155:
156: Generalized prims2x.fs into Vmgen (see README.vmgen etc.); used the
157: new capabilities in prims (e.g., automatic handling of the return
158: stack and instruction stream).
1.10 anton 159:
1.9 anton 160:
1.8 anton 161: User-visible changes between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0:
162:
163: Changes in behaviour:
164:
165: There are now two engines: the fast engine (gforth-fast) is at least
166: as fast as gforth in earlier releases; the debugging engine (gforth)
167: supports precise backtracing for signals (e.g., illegal memory
168: access), but is slower by a factor of 1-2.
169: Block files now start at block 0 by default (instead of block 1). If
170: you have block files around, prepend 1024 bytes to convert them, or
171: do a "1 OFFSET !" to establish the old behaviour.
172: Gforth now does not translate newlines to LFs on reading. Instead,
173: READ-LINE now interprets LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines. Newlines on
174: output are in the OSs favourite format.
175: SEE now disassembles primitives (or hex-DUMPs the code if no
176: disassembler is available).
177: >HEAD (aka >NAME) now returns 0 (instead of the nt of ???) on failure.
178: Syntax of prim changed: stack effects are now surrounded by
179: parentheses, tabs are insignificant.
180:
181: Operating environment:
182:
183: Gforth now produces a backtrace when catching an exception.
184: On platforms supporting the Unix 98 SA_SIGINFO semantics, you get more
185: precise error reports for SIGSEGV and SIGFPE (e.g., "stack
186: underflow" instead of "Invalid memory address").
187: Gforth now produces exit code 1 if there is an error (i.e., an
188: uncaught THROW) in batch processing.
189: You can use "gforthmi --application ..." to build an image that
190: processes the whole command-line when invoked directly (instead of
191: through gforth -i).
192:
193: Ports:
194:
195: AIX.
196: 20% speedup on 604e under powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu,
197: 19%-29% speedup on Celeron with gcc-2.95.
198:
199: New words:
200:
201: Missing ANS Forth words: EKEY EKEY? EKEY>CHAR
202: Timing words: CPUTIME UTIME
203: Vector arithmetic: V* FAXPY
204: FP comparison: F~ABS F~REL
205: Deferred words: <IS> [IS]
206: Nested number output: <<# #>>
207: Exception handling: TRY RECOVER ENDTRY
208: Directory handling: OPEN-DIR READ-DIR CLOSE-DIR FILENAME-MATCH
209: Other: ]L PUSH-ORDER
210:
211: Miscellaneous:
212:
213: Significant extensions to the manual (added an introduction, among
214: other things), many of them due to a new team member: Neal Crook.
215: Added assemblers and disassemblers for 386, Alpha, MIPS (thanks to
216: contributions by Andrew McKewan, Bernd Thallner, and Christian
217: Pirker). Contributions of assemblers and disassemblers for other
218: architectures are welcome.
219:
220:
1.6 anton 221: User-visible changes between 0.3.0 and 0.4.0:
222:
223: Operating environment:
224:
225: Path handling: "." at the start of the path represents the directory
226: the nearest enclosing file resides in (if there is none: the working
227: directory). "~+" indicates the working directory. The default path
228: now has "." in front.
229: gforth and gforthmi is now more GNU standards compliant (wrt
230: command-line options).
231: New command-line-option: --die-on-signal
232: Errors are now directed to stderr.
233: Stdout is now unbuffered, if it is a tty.
234: User input device redirection (for filters) is now possible.
235:
236: Ports:
237:
238: Now runs on IRIX (and other MIPS-based systems without linker-flag -d).
239: Direct threading now works on PowerPC (20% speedup on 604e).
240: Better support for m68k (thanks to Andreas Schwab and Jorge Acereda).
241: It is possible to create executables that contain the image (for
242: non-OS systems).
1.7 pazsan 243:
244: Added a lot of embedded control (EC) stuff. Supported controllers and
245: small CPUs are Siemens C16x, 8086, 6502, Mixed-Mode's FPGA MISC, Bernd Paysan's
246: 4stack processor. Not finished: ShBoom alias PSC1000, H8, AVR.
1.6 anton 247:
248: New, changed, and removed words:
249:
250: Renamed F0 to FP0 (avoids unexpected behaviour in hex), added aliases
251: SP0, RP0, LP0 (recommended for future use) for S0, R0, L0.
252: Renamed PARSE-WORD into SWORD (PARSE-WORD is used with the meaning of
253: NAME in OpenBoot and dpans6 A.6.2.2008)
254: Added FPICK (suggested by Julian Noble).
255: Added EXCEPTION.
256: S" gforth" ENVIRONMENT? now produces the version-string.
257: Changed representation of types in struct package, and correspondingly
258: changed names.
259:
260: Miscellaneous:
261:
262: Plain text documentation is now available in doc/gforth.txt.
263: Documentation improvements.
264: Wordlist structure changed.
265: Added mini-oof.
266: Reorganized files: added directories and reorganized many files into
267: them; renamed files into 8.3 format to work with completely broken
268: systems (but there are again some files that won't work there).
269: Bug fixes.
270: Various changes without log information only known as mega-patches.
1.7 pazsan 271: Cross compiler now also supports compilation only for undefined or forward
272: referenced words. Plugins to support some native code generation
273: (for PSC1000).
1.6 anton 274: More files in the compat library.
275:
276:
277:
1.5 anton 278: User-visible changes between 0.2.1 and 0.3.0:
279:
280: Stack overflow detection by memory protection on most systems
281: (allocation with mmap).
282: gforth.fi is now fully relocatable.
283: fully relocatable images are now easier to create.
284: added primitives K and UNDER+.
285: Win32 support.
286: Improved support for embedded controllers and other deprived environments.
287: some bug fixes.
288: added concept index; other documentation improvements.
289:
1.6 anton 290:
291:
1.5 anton 292: User-visible changes between 0.2.0 and 0.2.1:
1.4 anton 293:
294: Bug fixes
295:
1.6 anton 296:
297:
1.5 anton 298: User-visible changes between 0.1beta and 0.2.0:
1.1 anton 299:
1.3 anton 300: Portability and Installation:
301:
1.1 anton 302: Support architectures with buggy long longs (alpha-dec-osf).
1.3 anton 303: Better support for DOS and other non-Unix systems.
1.1 anton 304: Size changes through the command line are passed to the image (and
305: saved with savesystem); the preamble specifies an interpreter and is
306: propagated by save-system.
1.3 anton 307:
308: Tools:
309:
310: Improved etags support.
311: more.fs allows output paging.
312: Added compat/ directory containing ANS implementations of Gforth features.
313: Added tiny multitasker (tasker.fs).
314: Added two alternatives for object-oriented programming: oof.fs, objects.fs.
315: Added ans-report.fs (reports which words are used from which wordset).
316:
317: New words:
318:
319: Changed POPEN and PCLOSE to OPEN-PIPE and CLOSE-PIPE.
320: Added FORM, ROWS, and COLS.
321: added primitives EMIT-FILE, STDOUT, STDERR.
322: Added TABLEs (case-sensitive wordlists).
323: added POSTPONE,.
324: Added the ability to combine arbitrary interpretation and compilation
325: semantics (INTERPRET/COMPILE:); state-smart words were generally
326: rewritten to use that mechanism.
327:
328: Changes to existing words:
329:
330: EMIT and TYPE now work through file words (and are redirectable).
1.1 anton 331: HEADER now stores the compilation wordlist in the header and REVEAL
332: reveals into that wordlist.
1.3 anton 333: changed behaviour of SYSTEM (no longer returns wretval, but puts it in
334: $?) added (SYSTEM) ( c_addr u -- wretval wior ).
1.1 anton 335: ' and ['] now give an error for compile-only words.
1.3 anton 336:
1.12 anton 337: -----
1.26 anton 338: Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997,1998,2000,2003,2006,2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1.12 anton 339:
340: This file is part of Gforth.
341:
342: Gforth is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
343: modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
1.27 anton 344: as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3
1.12 anton 345: of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
346:
347: This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
348: but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
349: MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.#See the
350: GNU General Public License for more details.
351:
352: You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1.27 anton 353: along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
1.12 anton 354:
1.6 anton 355:
356: % Local Variables:
357: % fill-prefix: " "
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