Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.15
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).
1.15 ! anton 20: Gforth can now deal 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>