Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.14

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

FreeBSD-CVSweb <freebsd-cvsweb@FreeBSD.org>