Copyright (C) 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is free documentation; the Free Software Foundation gives unlimited permission to copy, distribute and modify it. MS-DOS: You need DJ Delorie's port of GCC to DOS (DJGPP 2.0) to compile Gforth. DJGPP provides a DPMI client that allows to use the 32-bit features of the 80386, but on the other hand it requires at least a 386. A DPMI host is also part of the DJGPP 2.0 package, this is required if you don't have a DPMI host yourself (Windows/OS/2/Linux DOS-box, Quemm or others). First run config config has the following useful parameters: --enable-force-reg Use explicit register declarations if they appear in the machine.h file. This can cause a good speedup, but also incorrect code with some gcc versions on some processors (default disabled). --enable-direct-threaded Force direct threading. This may not work on some machines and may cause slowdown on others. (default disabled) --enable-indirect-threaded Force indirect threading. This can cause a slowdown on some machines. (default enabled) OS/2: You need EMX 0.9c to compile Gforth. The EMX package provides all necessary Unix-like tools, tty and signal handling. Windows 95/Windows NT: You need the Cygnus Win32 package. This package currently is only in beta test, so expect bugs and quirks. If you don't want to install the DJGPP, CYGWIN32 or EMX package (quite large), look for a binary distribution of Gforth for DOS, Win32 or OS/2. You also must have a version of GNU make, because DOS/Win32/OS/2 make programs are likely to have problems with the Makefile. If you want to change Gforth, you may need GNU m4, too. Because DJGPP provides some use of long filenames under Windows 95, you should unpack the gforth package with a Windows-95-aware archiver (those from DJGPP or the Cygnus Win32-package come in mind), because otherwise gforth will not find the necessary files. With MS-DOS versions prior 7.0 or DR-DOS, these names are cut due to the 8.3 rule. This might confuse DJGPP 2.0's make, you could use DJGPP 1.x's make instead. Gforth 0.4.0 hasn't been compiled with a MS-DOS prior 7.0. Compiling under DOS or OS/2 has a number of quirks, and if it doesn't compile out of the box, you should know what you do. I therefore discourage unexperienced users to compile gforth themselves. There's a binary package for it anyway. Compiling using CygWin32 works a bit better, but there are still quirks. The package allows to "mount" Windows directories under typical unix locations. E.g. I installed the package in E:\cygnus, and then I mount /usr, /usr/local and /bin with ./mount e:/cygnus /usr ./mount e:/cygnus/H-i386-cygwin32 /usr/local ./mount e:/cygnus/H-i386-cygwin32/bin /bin once. Each time I start CygWin32's bash, I set up the following variables: export TMPDIR=/usr/tmp export COMPILER_PATH=/usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/i386-cygwin32/cygnus-2.7.2-970404 export LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib;/usr/local/lib" export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/local/i386-cygwin32/include export GCC_DEFAULT_OPTIONS="-specs=$COMPILER_PATH/specs" export PATH=/bin:.:$PATH Write this into a script and source it in at each bash invocation, or put it into your .bashrc. If you don't bother and want to make it yourself, type configure configure has the following useful parameters: --enable-force-reg Use explicit register declarations if they appear in the machine.h file. This can cause a good speedup, but also incorrect code with some gcc versions on some processors (default disabled). --enable-direct-threaded Force direct threading. This may not work on some machines and may cause slowdown on others. (default disabled) --enable-indirect-threaded Force indirect threading. This can cause a slowdown on some machines. (default enabled) After covering all inconveniences, type make Now you can check whether your shiny new Forth system works. Say make test You can run some benchmarks with make bench and compare them with the results in Benchres and in the manual. DOS and OS/2 don't allow to run the benchmarks, since the command TIME means something different there. Don't try to do "make install" there, it won't work, either. It is not possible to "make dist" or "make bindist", too, because of the limitations of DOS command lines. Add the following entry to your Autoexec.bat: SET GFORTHPATH=;. Use / instead of \ in your gforth source directory. Gforth now uses ';' as path separator for DOS and OS/2 (not for Cygwin32), so you won't have problems with DOS pathes that may contain ':', which is the default path separator in Unix. Use ~+ for the current directory. For paper documentation, print gforth.ps (a Postscript file (300dpi fonts, i.e., it works, but does not produce best quality on better printers)), or say make gforth.dvi and print the resulting file gforth.dvi (you need TeX for that! But with TeX you can print it even if you don't have a Postscript printer nor Ghostscript). You could be able to make a HTML version of the document, but AFAIK there is no texi2html for DOS available, as there is no perl available. You should get the HTML pages from the same location where you got Gforth or from http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/ or ftp://ftp.complang.tuwien.ac.at/pub/forth/gforth/