Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.29

1.20      anton       1: 
                      2: 
1.29    ! anton       3: User-visible changes between 0.6.2 and 0.6.9 (up to 2008-07-16):
1.20      anton       4: 
1.28      anton       5: Requirements:
                      6:   At run-time requires libtool and gcc (for libcc C interface) and
                      7:                        gdb (for disassembler (SEE) on some platforms).
1.20      anton       8: Installation:
                      9:   support for DESTDIR, POST_INSTALL, INSTALL_SCRIPT
1.28      anton      10:   automatic performance tuning on building (--enable-force-reg unnecessary)
                     11:   report performance and functionality problems at end of "make"
                     12:   autogen.sh now exists
                     13: License:
                     14:   Changed to GPLv3
1.20      anton      15: Bug fixes
1.22      anton      16:   Now works with address-space randomization.
1.20      anton      17:   The single-step debugger works again in some engines.
1.22      anton      18:   Many others.
1.20      anton      19: Ports:
                     20:   AMD64, ARM, IA-64 (Itanium): better performance
1.22      anton      21:   PPC: disassembler and assembler (32-bit)
1.28      anton      22:   Gforth EC: R8C, Lego NXT (not distributed; complete?)
                     23:   MacOS X: better support
1.22      anton      24: Invocation:
                     25:   New flags --ignore-async-signals, --vm-commit (default overcommit)
1.28      anton      26:             --print-sequences
1.20      anton      27: Forth 200x:
                     28:   extension queries (produce true for all implemented extensions)
                     29:   REQUIRED etc. (not new)
                     30:   [DEFINED] and [UNDEFINED]
                     31:   PARSE-NAME (new name)
                     32:   deferred words (new: DEFER@ DEFER! ACTION-OF)
1.24      anton      33:   X:structures: +FIELD FIELD: FFIELD: CFIELD: etc.
1.25      anton      34:   X:ekeys: new: EKEY>FKEY K-SHIFT-MASK K-CTRL-MASK K-ALT-MASK K-F1...K-F12
1.28      anton      35: Unicode support (currently supports only uniform encoding):
1.20      anton      36:   added xchars words for dealing with variable-width multi-byte characters
                     37:   provide 8bit (ISO Latin 1) and UTF-8 support for xchars
                     38: Number prefixes:
                     39:   0x is a hex prefix: 0xff and 0XfF now produces (decimal) 255
                     40:   # is a decimal prefix: #10 now produces (decimal) 10
1.24      anton      41:   Signs after the number prefix are now accepted, e.g, #-50.
1.20      anton      42:   ' now only handles a single (x)char: 'ab is no longer accepted, 
                     43:                                        'a' now produces (decimal) 97
                     44: New words:
1.28      anton      45:   \C C-FUNCTION C-LIBRARY END-C-LIBRARY C-LIBRARY-NAME (libcc C interface)
                     46:   LIB-ERROR (complements OPEN-LIB)
1.22      anton      47:   OUTFILE-EXECUTE INFILE-EXECUTE BASE-EXECUTE (limited change of global state)
                     48:   16-bit and 32-bit memory acces: UW@ UL@ SW@ SL@ W! L! W@ L@ /W /L
                     49:   NEXT-ARG SHIFT-ARGS (OS command-line argument processing)
                     50:   NOTHROW (for backtrace control)
1.20      anton      51:   FTRUNC FMOD (undocumented)
1.24      anton      52:   SEE-CODE SEE-CODE-RANGE (show generated dynamic native code)
1.22      anton      53: Improvements/changes of existing words:
1.25      anton      54:   S\", .\" now support \l, \m, \z, and limits hex and octal character specs.
                     55:   OPEN-FILE with W/O no longer creates or truncates files (no compat. file)
1.28      anton      56:   OPEN-LIB now understands ~ at the start, like OPEN-FILE.
1.22      anton      57:   TRY...ENDTRY changed significantly, compatibility files available (see docs).
                     58:   The disassembler (DISCODE) can now use gdb to disassemble code
                     59:   Uninitialized defered words now give a warning when executed
                     60:   Division is floored (disable with "configure --enable-force-cdiv")
                     61:   Gforth (not gforth-fast) reports division by zero and overflow on division
                     62:     on all platforms.
1.20      anton      63: Newly documented words:
                     64:   S>NUMBER? S>UNUMBER?
1.25      anton      65:   EKEY keypress names: K-LEFT  K-RIGHT K-UP K-DOWN K-HOME K-END K-PRIOR
                     66:     K-NEXT K-INSERT K-DELETE
1.20      anton      67:   CLEARSTACKS
1.22      anton      68:   FORM
1.20      anton      69: Environment variable GFORTHSYSTEMPREFIX (used by word SYSTEM and friends)
                     70: C interface:
                     71:   exported symbols now start with "gforth_" (for referencing them from C code)
1.28      anton      72:   libcc C function call interface (requires libtool and gcc at run-time)
                     73:     alternative: undocumented libffi-based interface
1.20      anton      74: Libraries:
                     75:   depth-changes.fs: report stack depth changes during interpretation
1.22      anton      76:   ans-report.fs now reports CfV extensions
1.20      anton      77:   fsl-util.4th: FSL support files (undocumented)
                     78:   regexp.fs for regular expressions (undocumented)
                     79:   complex.fs for complex numbers (undocumented)
                     80:   fft.fs for Fast Fourier Transform (undocumented)
                     81:   wf.fs, a Wiki implementation (undocumented)
                     82:   httpd.fs, a web server (undocumented)
                     83:   status.fs, show interpreter status in separate xterm (undocumented)
                     84:   profile.fs for profiling (undocumented, incomplete)
1.22      anton      85:   endtry-iferror.fs, recover-endtry.fs to ease the TRY change transition
1.24      anton      86:   test/tester.fs: Now works with FP numbers (undocumented)
                     87:   test/ttester.fs: Version of tester.fs with improved interface (T{...}T).
1.20      anton      88:  compat library:
                     89:   compat/execute-parsing.fs
                     90: Speed improvements:
1.28      anton      91:   automatic performance tuning on building
1.20      anton      92:   static stack caching (good speedup on PPC)
1.22      anton      93:   mixed-precision division is now faster
1.20      anton      94:   support for int128 types on AMD64
                     95:   workarounds for gcc performance bugs (in particular, PR 15242)
1.24      anton      96:   branch target alignment (good speedup on Alpha).
1.20      anton      97: 
                     98: 
1.18      anton      99: User-visible changes between 0.6.1 and 0.6.2:
                    100: 
1.19      anton     101: Bug fixes (in particular, gforth-0.6.2 compiles with gcc-3.3)
                    102: New words: LATEST, LATESTXT (LASTXT deprecated)
                    103: Operating environment: Added optional support for a C interface built
                    104:   on the ffcall libraries (more portable and powerful than the old
                    105:   one, but still not documented).  To use it, the ffcall libraries
                    106:   have to be installed before building Gforth (see INSTALL).
                    107: Miscellaneous: Gforth-fast now uses static superinstructions (some
                    108:   speedup on some platforms); generally this is transparent (apart
                    109:   from the speedup), but there are lots of command-line options for
                    110:   controlling the static superinstruction generation.
1.18      anton     111: 
                    112: 
1.16      anton     113: User-visible changes between 0.6.0 and 0.6.1:
                    114: 
                    115: Bug fixes (installation on big-endian machines sometimes did not work)
                    116: 
                    117: 
1.9       anton     118: User-visible changes between 0.5.0 and 0.6.0:
                    119: 
1.14      anton     120: Changes in behaviour:
1.10      anton     121: 
1.14      anton     122: S": interpreted use now ALLOCATEs the string (they live until BYE).
                    123: Long word names (512MB on 32-bit systems) are now supported (change to
                    124:   the header format).
                    125: New threaded code execution method: primitive-centric (allows the
                    126:   following), hybrid direct/indirect threaded (easier portability),
                    127:   with dynamic superinstructions (typical speedup on Athlon: factor
                    128:   2).  New engine gforth-itc for dealing with some potential
1.16      anton     129:   backwards-compatibility problems (see "Direct or Indirect Threaded?"
                    130:   in the manual).
1.14      anton     131: 
                    132: Operating environment:
                    133: 
                    134: Default dictionary size is now 4MB.
1.10      anton     135: Large file support on OSs that support them (i.e., files with more
                    136:   than 2GB on 32-bit machines).
1.15      anton     137: Gforth can now deal well with broken pipes in most situations.
1.10      anton     138: vi tags files can be built with tags.fs (usage like etags.fs).
1.14      anton     139: gforth.el mostly rewritten.
                    140: New image file format.
1.10      anton     141: 
1.14      anton     142: New words:
1.10      anton     143: 
1.14      anton     144: Keyboard input: EDIT-LINE K-PRIOR K-NEXT K-DELETE
                    145: File input: SLURP-FILE SLURP-FID 
                    146: Programming tools: ID. .ID WORDLIST-WORDS SIMPLE-SEE
                    147: Conditional execution: [DEFINED] [UNDEFINED]
1.17      anton     148: Defining Words: CONST-DOES> ]]
1.14      anton     149: Input stream: PARSE-WORD EXECUTE-PARSING EXECUTE-PARSING-FILE
                    150: String comparison: STR= STR< STRING-PREFIX?
                    151: String literals: S\" .\" \"-PARSE
                    152: Floating point output: F.RDP F>STR-RDP F>BUF-RDP
1.9       anton     153: 
1.14      anton     154: Miscellaneous:
1.9       anton     155: 
                    156: Generalized prims2x.fs into Vmgen (see README.vmgen etc.); used the
                    157:   new capabilities in prims (e.g., automatic handling of the return
                    158:   stack and instruction stream).
1.10      anton     159: 
1.9       anton     160: 
1.8       anton     161: User-visible changes between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0:
                    162: 
                    163: Changes in behaviour:
                    164: 
                    165: There are now two engines: the fast engine (gforth-fast) is at least
                    166:   as fast as gforth in earlier releases; the debugging engine (gforth)
                    167:   supports precise backtracing for signals (e.g., illegal memory
                    168:   access), but is slower by a factor of 1-2.
                    169: Block files now start at block 0 by default (instead of block 1).  If
                    170:   you have block files around, prepend 1024 bytes to convert them, or
                    171:   do a "1 OFFSET !" to establish the old behaviour.
                    172: Gforth now does not translate newlines to LFs on reading.  Instead,
                    173:   READ-LINE now interprets LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines.  Newlines on
                    174:   output are in the OSs favourite format.
                    175: SEE now disassembles primitives (or hex-DUMPs the code if no
                    176:   disassembler is available).
                    177: >HEAD (aka >NAME) now returns 0 (instead of the nt of ???) on failure.
                    178: Syntax of prim changed: stack effects are now surrounded by
                    179:   parentheses, tabs are insignificant.
                    180: 
                    181: Operating environment:
                    182: 
                    183: Gforth now produces a backtrace when catching an exception.
                    184: On platforms supporting the Unix 98 SA_SIGINFO semantics, you get more
                    185:   precise error reports for SIGSEGV and SIGFPE (e.g., "stack
                    186:   underflow" instead of "Invalid memory address").
                    187: Gforth now produces exit code 1 if there is an error (i.e., an
                    188:   uncaught THROW) in batch processing.
                    189: You can use "gforthmi --application ..." to build an image that
                    190:   processes the whole command-line when invoked directly (instead of
                    191:   through gforth -i).
                    192: 
                    193: Ports:
                    194: 
                    195: AIX.
                    196: 20% speedup on 604e under powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu,
                    197: 19%-29% speedup on Celeron with gcc-2.95.
                    198: 
                    199: New words:
                    200: 
                    201: Missing ANS Forth words: EKEY EKEY? EKEY>CHAR
                    202: Timing words: CPUTIME UTIME
                    203: Vector arithmetic: V* FAXPY
                    204: FP comparison: F~ABS F~REL
                    205: Deferred words: <IS> [IS]
                    206: Nested number output: <<# #>>
                    207: Exception handling: TRY RECOVER ENDTRY
                    208: Directory handling: OPEN-DIR READ-DIR CLOSE-DIR FILENAME-MATCH
                    209: Other: ]L PUSH-ORDER
                    210: 
                    211: Miscellaneous:
                    212: 
                    213: Significant extensions to the manual (added an introduction, among
                    214:   other things), many of them due to a new team member: Neal Crook.
                    215: Added assemblers and disassemblers for 386, Alpha, MIPS (thanks to
                    216:   contributions by Andrew McKewan, Bernd Thallner, and Christian
                    217:   Pirker).  Contributions of assemblers and disassemblers for other
                    218:   architectures are welcome.
                    219: 
                    220: 
1.6       anton     221: User-visible changes between 0.3.0 and 0.4.0:
                    222: 
                    223: Operating environment:
                    224: 
                    225: Path handling: "." at the start of the path represents the directory
                    226:   the nearest enclosing file resides in (if there is none: the working
                    227:   directory). "~+" indicates the working directory.  The default path
                    228:   now has "." in front.
                    229: gforth and gforthmi is now more GNU standards compliant (wrt
                    230:   command-line options).
                    231: New command-line-option: --die-on-signal
                    232: Errors are now directed to stderr.
                    233: Stdout is now unbuffered, if it is a tty.
                    234: User input device redirection (for filters) is now possible.
                    235: 
                    236: Ports:
                    237: 
                    238: Now runs on IRIX (and other MIPS-based systems without linker-flag -d).
                    239: Direct threading now works on PowerPC (20% speedup on 604e).
                    240: Better support for m68k (thanks to Andreas Schwab and Jorge Acereda).
                    241: It is possible to create executables that contain the image (for
                    242:   non-OS systems).
1.7       pazsan    243: 
                    244: Added a lot of embedded control (EC) stuff. Supported controllers and
                    245: small CPUs are Siemens C16x, 8086, 6502, Mixed-Mode's FPGA MISC, Bernd Paysan's
                    246: 4stack processor. Not finished: ShBoom alias PSC1000, H8, AVR.
1.6       anton     247: 
                    248: New, changed, and removed words:
                    249: 
                    250: Renamed F0 to FP0 (avoids unexpected behaviour in hex), added aliases
                    251:   SP0, RP0, LP0 (recommended for future use) for S0, R0, L0.
                    252: Renamed PARSE-WORD into SWORD (PARSE-WORD is used with the meaning of
                    253:   NAME in OpenBoot and dpans6 A.6.2.2008)
                    254: Added FPICK (suggested by Julian Noble).
                    255: Added EXCEPTION.
                    256: S" gforth" ENVIRONMENT? now produces the version-string.
                    257: Changed representation of types in struct package, and correspondingly
                    258:   changed names.
                    259: 
                    260: Miscellaneous:
                    261: 
                    262: Plain text documentation is now available in doc/gforth.txt.
                    263: Documentation improvements.
                    264: Wordlist structure changed.
                    265: Added mini-oof.
                    266: Reorganized files: added directories and reorganized many files into
                    267:   them; renamed files into 8.3 format to work with completely broken
                    268:   systems (but there are again some files that won't work there).
                    269: Bug fixes.
                    270: Various changes without log information only known as mega-patches.
1.7       pazsan    271: Cross compiler now also supports compilation only for undefined or forward
                    272: referenced words. Plugins to support some native code generation
                    273: (for PSC1000).
1.6       anton     274: More files in the compat library.
                    275: 
                    276: 
                    277: 
1.5       anton     278: User-visible changes between 0.2.1 and 0.3.0:
                    279: 
                    280: Stack overflow detection by memory protection on most systems
                    281:        (allocation with mmap).
                    282: gforth.fi is now fully relocatable.
                    283: fully relocatable images are now easier to create.
                    284: added primitives K and UNDER+.
                    285: Win32 support.
                    286: Improved support for embedded controllers and other deprived environments.
                    287: some bug fixes.
                    288: added concept index; other documentation improvements.
                    289: 
1.6       anton     290: 
                    291: 
1.5       anton     292: User-visible changes between 0.2.0 and 0.2.1:
1.4       anton     293: 
                    294: Bug fixes
                    295: 
1.6       anton     296: 
                    297: 
1.5       anton     298: User-visible changes between 0.1beta and 0.2.0:
1.1       anton     299: 
1.3       anton     300: Portability and Installation:
                    301: 
1.1       anton     302: Support architectures with buggy long longs (alpha-dec-osf).
1.3       anton     303: Better support for DOS and other non-Unix systems.
1.1       anton     304: Size changes through the command line are passed to the image (and
                    305: saved with savesystem); the preamble specifies an interpreter and is
                    306: propagated by save-system.
1.3       anton     307: 
                    308: Tools:
                    309: 
                    310: Improved etags support.
                    311: more.fs allows output paging.
                    312: Added compat/ directory containing ANS implementations of Gforth features.
                    313: Added tiny multitasker (tasker.fs).
                    314: Added two alternatives for object-oriented programming: oof.fs, objects.fs.
                    315: Added ans-report.fs (reports which words are used from which wordset).
                    316: 
                    317: New words:
                    318: 
                    319: Changed POPEN and PCLOSE to OPEN-PIPE and CLOSE-PIPE.
                    320: Added FORM, ROWS, and COLS.
                    321: added primitives EMIT-FILE, STDOUT, STDERR.
                    322: Added TABLEs (case-sensitive wordlists).
                    323: added POSTPONE,.
                    324: Added the ability to combine arbitrary interpretation and compilation
                    325: semantics (INTERPRET/COMPILE:); state-smart words were generally
                    326: rewritten to use that mechanism.
                    327: 
                    328: Changes to existing words:
                    329: 
                    330: EMIT and TYPE now work through file words (and are redirectable).
1.1       anton     331: HEADER now stores the compilation wordlist in the header and REVEAL
                    332: reveals into that wordlist.
1.3       anton     333: changed behaviour of SYSTEM (no longer returns wretval, but puts it in
                    334: $?)  added (SYSTEM) ( c_addr u -- wretval wior ).
1.1       anton     335: ' and ['] now give an error for compile-only words.
1.3       anton     336: 
1.12      anton     337: -----
1.26      anton     338: Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997,1998,2000,2003,2006,2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1.12      anton     339: 
                    340: This file is part of Gforth.
                    341: 
                    342: Gforth is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
                    343: modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
1.27      anton     344: as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3
1.12      anton     345: of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
                    346: 
                    347: This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
                    348: but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
                    349: MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.#See the
                    350: GNU General Public License for more details.
                    351: 
                    352: You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1.27      anton     353: along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
1.12      anton     354: 
1.6       anton     355: 
                    356: % Local Variables:
                    357: % fill-prefix: "  "

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