Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.16

1.16    ! anton       1: User-visible changes between 0.6.0 and 0.6.1:
        !             2: 
        !             3: Bug fixes (installation on big-endian machines sometimes did not work)
        !             4: 
        !             5: 
1.9       anton       6: User-visible changes between 0.5.0 and 0.6.0:
                      7: 
1.14      anton       8: Changes in behaviour:
1.10      anton       9: 
1.14      anton      10: S": interpreted use now ALLOCATEs the string (they live until BYE).
                     11: Long word names (512MB on 32-bit systems) are now supported (change to
                     12:   the header format).
                     13: New threaded code execution method: primitive-centric (allows the
                     14:   following), hybrid direct/indirect threaded (easier portability),
                     15:   with dynamic superinstructions (typical speedup on Athlon: factor
                     16:   2).  New engine gforth-itc for dealing with some potential
1.16    ! anton      17:   backwards-compatibility problems (see "Direct or Indirect Threaded?"
        !            18:   in the manual).
1.14      anton      19: 
                     20: Operating environment:
                     21: 
                     22: Default dictionary size is now 4MB.
1.10      anton      23: Large file support on OSs that support them (i.e., files with more
                     24:   than 2GB on 32-bit machines).
1.15      anton      25: Gforth can now deal well with broken pipes in most situations.
1.10      anton      26: vi tags files can be built with tags.fs (usage like etags.fs).
1.14      anton      27: gforth.el mostly rewritten.
                     28: New image file format.
1.10      anton      29: 
1.14      anton      30: New words:
1.10      anton      31: 
1.14      anton      32: Keyboard input: EDIT-LINE K-PRIOR K-NEXT K-DELETE
                     33: File input: SLURP-FILE SLURP-FID 
                     34: Programming tools: ID. .ID WORDLIST-WORDS SIMPLE-SEE
                     35: Conditional execution: [DEFINED] [UNDEFINED]
                     36: Defining Words: CONST-DOES>
                     37: Input stream: PARSE-WORD EXECUTE-PARSING EXECUTE-PARSING-FILE
                     38: String comparison: STR= STR< STRING-PREFIX?
                     39: String literals: S\" .\" \"-PARSE
                     40: Floating point output: F.RDP F>STR-RDP F>BUF-RDP
1.9       anton      41: 
1.14      anton      42: Miscellaneous:
1.9       anton      43: 
                     44: Generalized prims2x.fs into Vmgen (see README.vmgen etc.); used the
                     45:   new capabilities in prims (e.g., automatic handling of the return
                     46:   stack and instruction stream).
1.10      anton      47: 
1.9       anton      48: 
1.8       anton      49: User-visible changes between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0:
                     50: 
                     51: Changes in behaviour:
                     52: 
                     53: There are now two engines: the fast engine (gforth-fast) is at least
                     54:   as fast as gforth in earlier releases; the debugging engine (gforth)
                     55:   supports precise backtracing for signals (e.g., illegal memory
                     56:   access), but is slower by a factor of 1-2.
                     57: Block files now start at block 0 by default (instead of block 1).  If
                     58:   you have block files around, prepend 1024 bytes to convert them, or
                     59:   do a "1 OFFSET !" to establish the old behaviour.
                     60: Gforth now does not translate newlines to LFs on reading.  Instead,
                     61:   READ-LINE now interprets LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines.  Newlines on
                     62:   output are in the OSs favourite format.
                     63: SEE now disassembles primitives (or hex-DUMPs the code if no
                     64:   disassembler is available).
                     65: >HEAD (aka >NAME) now returns 0 (instead of the nt of ???) on failure.
                     66: Syntax of prim changed: stack effects are now surrounded by
                     67:   parentheses, tabs are insignificant.
                     68: 
                     69: Operating environment:
                     70: 
                     71: Gforth now produces a backtrace when catching an exception.
                     72: On platforms supporting the Unix 98 SA_SIGINFO semantics, you get more
                     73:   precise error reports for SIGSEGV and SIGFPE (e.g., "stack
                     74:   underflow" instead of "Invalid memory address").
                     75: Gforth now produces exit code 1 if there is an error (i.e., an
                     76:   uncaught THROW) in batch processing.
                     77: You can use "gforthmi --application ..." to build an image that
                     78:   processes the whole command-line when invoked directly (instead of
                     79:   through gforth -i).
                     80: 
                     81: Ports:
                     82: 
                     83: AIX.
                     84: 20% speedup on 604e under powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu,
                     85: 19%-29% speedup on Celeron with gcc-2.95.
                     86: 
                     87: New words:
                     88: 
                     89: Missing ANS Forth words: EKEY EKEY? EKEY>CHAR
                     90: Timing words: CPUTIME UTIME
                     91: Vector arithmetic: V* FAXPY
                     92: FP comparison: F~ABS F~REL
                     93: Deferred words: <IS> [IS]
                     94: Nested number output: <<# #>>
                     95: Exception handling: TRY RECOVER ENDTRY
                     96: Directory handling: OPEN-DIR READ-DIR CLOSE-DIR FILENAME-MATCH
                     97: Other: ]L PUSH-ORDER
                     98: 
                     99: Miscellaneous:
                    100: 
                    101: Significant extensions to the manual (added an introduction, among
                    102:   other things), many of them due to a new team member: Neal Crook.
                    103: Added assemblers and disassemblers for 386, Alpha, MIPS (thanks to
                    104:   contributions by Andrew McKewan, Bernd Thallner, and Christian
                    105:   Pirker).  Contributions of assemblers and disassemblers for other
                    106:   architectures are welcome.
                    107: 
                    108: 
1.6       anton     109: User-visible changes between 0.3.0 and 0.4.0:
                    110: 
                    111: Operating environment:
                    112: 
                    113: Path handling: "." at the start of the path represents the directory
                    114:   the nearest enclosing file resides in (if there is none: the working
                    115:   directory). "~+" indicates the working directory.  The default path
                    116:   now has "." in front.
                    117: gforth and gforthmi is now more GNU standards compliant (wrt
                    118:   command-line options).
                    119: New command-line-option: --die-on-signal
                    120: Errors are now directed to stderr.
                    121: Stdout is now unbuffered, if it is a tty.
                    122: User input device redirection (for filters) is now possible.
                    123: 
                    124: Ports:
                    125: 
                    126: Now runs on IRIX (and other MIPS-based systems without linker-flag -d).
                    127: Direct threading now works on PowerPC (20% speedup on 604e).
                    128: Better support for m68k (thanks to Andreas Schwab and Jorge Acereda).
                    129: It is possible to create executables that contain the image (for
                    130:   non-OS systems).
1.7       pazsan    131: 
                    132: Added a lot of embedded control (EC) stuff. Supported controllers and
                    133: small CPUs are Siemens C16x, 8086, 6502, Mixed-Mode's FPGA MISC, Bernd Paysan's
                    134: 4stack processor. Not finished: ShBoom alias PSC1000, H8, AVR.
1.6       anton     135: 
                    136: New, changed, and removed words:
                    137: 
                    138: Renamed F0 to FP0 (avoids unexpected behaviour in hex), added aliases
                    139:   SP0, RP0, LP0 (recommended for future use) for S0, R0, L0.
                    140: Renamed PARSE-WORD into SWORD (PARSE-WORD is used with the meaning of
                    141:   NAME in OpenBoot and dpans6 A.6.2.2008)
                    142: Added FPICK (suggested by Julian Noble).
                    143: Added EXCEPTION.
                    144: S" gforth" ENVIRONMENT? now produces the version-string.
                    145: Changed representation of types in struct package, and correspondingly
                    146:   changed names.
                    147: 
                    148: Miscellaneous:
                    149: 
                    150: Plain text documentation is now available in doc/gforth.txt.
                    151: Documentation improvements.
                    152: Wordlist structure changed.
                    153: Added mini-oof.
                    154: Reorganized files: added directories and reorganized many files into
                    155:   them; renamed files into 8.3 format to work with completely broken
                    156:   systems (but there are again some files that won't work there).
                    157: Bug fixes.
                    158: Various changes without log information only known as mega-patches.
1.7       pazsan    159: Cross compiler now also supports compilation only for undefined or forward
                    160: referenced words. Plugins to support some native code generation
                    161: (for PSC1000).
1.6       anton     162: More files in the compat library.
                    163: 
                    164: 
                    165: 
1.5       anton     166: User-visible changes between 0.2.1 and 0.3.0:
                    167: 
                    168: Stack overflow detection by memory protection on most systems
                    169:        (allocation with mmap).
                    170: gforth.fi is now fully relocatable.
                    171: fully relocatable images are now easier to create.
                    172: added primitives K and UNDER+.
                    173: Win32 support.
                    174: Improved support for embedded controllers and other deprived environments.
                    175: some bug fixes.
                    176: added concept index; other documentation improvements.
                    177: 
1.6       anton     178: 
                    179: 
1.5       anton     180: User-visible changes between 0.2.0 and 0.2.1:
1.4       anton     181: 
                    182: Bug fixes
                    183: 
1.6       anton     184: 
                    185: 
1.5       anton     186: User-visible changes between 0.1beta and 0.2.0:
1.1       anton     187: 
1.3       anton     188: Portability and Installation:
                    189: 
1.1       anton     190: Support architectures with buggy long longs (alpha-dec-osf).
1.3       anton     191: Better support for DOS and other non-Unix systems.
1.1       anton     192: Size changes through the command line are passed to the image (and
                    193: saved with savesystem); the preamble specifies an interpreter and is
                    194: propagated by save-system.
1.3       anton     195: 
                    196: Tools:
                    197: 
                    198: Improved etags support.
                    199: more.fs allows output paging.
                    200: Added compat/ directory containing ANS implementations of Gforth features.
                    201: Added tiny multitasker (tasker.fs).
                    202: Added two alternatives for object-oriented programming: oof.fs, objects.fs.
                    203: Added ans-report.fs (reports which words are used from which wordset).
                    204: 
                    205: New words:
                    206: 
                    207: Changed POPEN and PCLOSE to OPEN-PIPE and CLOSE-PIPE.
                    208: Added FORM, ROWS, and COLS.
                    209: added primitives EMIT-FILE, STDOUT, STDERR.
                    210: Added TABLEs (case-sensitive wordlists).
                    211: added POSTPONE,.
                    212: Added the ability to combine arbitrary interpretation and compilation
                    213: semantics (INTERPRET/COMPILE:); state-smart words were generally
                    214: rewritten to use that mechanism.
                    215: 
                    216: Changes to existing words:
                    217: 
                    218: EMIT and TYPE now work through file words (and are redirectable).
1.1       anton     219: HEADER now stores the compilation wordlist in the header and REVEAL
                    220: reveals into that wordlist.
1.3       anton     221: changed behaviour of SYSTEM (no longer returns wretval, but puts it in
                    222: $?)  added (SYSTEM) ( c_addr u -- wretval wior ).
1.1       anton     223: ' and ['] now give an error for compile-only words.
1.3       anton     224: 
1.12      anton     225: -----
1.13      anton     226: Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997,1998,2000,2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1.12      anton     227: 
                    228: This file is part of Gforth.
                    229: 
                    230: Gforth is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
                    231: modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
                    232: as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
                    233: of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
                    234: 
                    235: This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
                    236: but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
                    237: MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.#See the
                    238: GNU General Public License for more details.
                    239: 
                    240: You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
                    241: along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
                    242: Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
                    243: 
1.6       anton     244: 
                    245: % Local Variables:
                    246: % fill-prefix: "  "

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