File:  [gforth] / gforth / README
Revision 1.29: download - view: text, annotated - select for diffs
Wed Dec 23 23:59:21 1998 UTC (25 years, 3 months ago) by anton
Branches: MAIN
CVS tags: HEAD
fixed a few small problems (mainly with bindist)

Gforth is a fast and portable implementation of the ANS Forth
language. It works nicely with the Emacs editor, offers some nice
features such as input completion and history and a powerful locals
facility, and it even has (the beginnings of) a manual. Gforth employs
traditional implementation techniques: its inner innerpreter is
indirect or direct threaded.  Gforth is distributed under the GNU
General Public license (see COPYING).

Gforth runs under Unix and DOS and should not be hard to port to other
systems supported by GCC. This version has been tested successfully on the
following platforms:
i486-pc-linux-gnulibc1 (libc5)
i686-pc-linux-gnu (libc6)
alphaev56-unknown-linux-gnulibc1
alpha-dec-osf4.0b
mips-sgi-irix6.2
mips-dec-ultrix4.3
sparc-sun-sunos4.1.4
sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1
powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
hppa1.1-hp-hpux10.20

Read INSTALL for installation instructions, or INSTALL.DOS for DOS, Windows
95, and OS/2. Mail bug-gforth@gnu.ai.mit.edu if you have problems.  To start
the system, just say `gforth' (after installing it).

You can find new versions of Gforth at prep.ai.mit.edu and its mirrors
or at

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/
or
ftp://ftp.complang.tuwien.ac.at/pub/forth/gforth/

The latter site contains binary distributions of Gforth for some
popular platforms.

If you want to work on Gforth, mail me. Tasks to be done can be found
in ToDo; but if you would like to do something not mentioned there,
it's ok, too. In any case, we would like to hear what you are
doing. The most important tasks IMO are the missing ANS Forth words,
the documentation and the foreign language interface for C.

On popular request, here are the meanings of unusual file extensions:

*.fs	Forth stream source file (include with "include <file>" from within
        gforth, or start with "gforth <file1> <file2> ...")
*.fi	Forth image files (start with "gforth -i <image file>")
*.fb	Forth blocks file (load with "use <block file> 1 load")
*.i	C include files
*.ds	documenation source
*TAGS	etags files

A number of Forth source files are included in this package that are
not necessary for building Gforth. Not all of them are mentioned in
the rest of the documentation, so here's a short overview:

Add-ons:
code.fs random.fs more.fs ansi.fs colorize.fs
oof.fs oofsampl.fs objects.fs

Utilities:
ans-report.fs etags.fs glosgen.fs filedump.fs

Games:
tt.fs sokoban.fs

Test programs (for testing Forth systems):
test/*.fs

Benchmarks:
bubble.fs siev.fs matrix.fs fib.fs

ANS Forth implementations of Gforth extensions:
compat/*.fs other.fs

There's a mailing list for things around Gforth that aren't bugs
(suggestions, discussions, etc.). To post, send your mail to
GForth@ChaosSolutions.com. To subscribe, send a mail to
Mdaemon@ChaosSolutions.com with:

subscribe GForth

as the first and only line within the message body.


- anton
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

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