Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.31
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:
1.31 ! anton 6: At run-time requires libtool and gcc (for the libcc C interface) and
! 7: gdb (for the 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
1.31 ! anton 21: PPC, PPC64: disassembler and assembler
! 22: Gforth EC: R8C, 4stack, misc, 8086 work
1.28 anton 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:
1.31 ! anton 28: X:extension-query: produce true for all implemented extensions
! 29: X:required REQUIRED etc. (not new)
! 30: X:defined: [DEFINED] and [UNDEFINED]
! 31: X:parse-name: PARSE-NAME (new name)
! 32: X:deferred: 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
1.31 ! anton 35: X:fp-stack (not new)
! 36: X:number-prefixes (partially new, see below)
1.20 anton 37: Number prefixes:
38: 0x is a hex prefix: 0xff and 0XfF now produces (decimal) 255
39: # is a decimal prefix: #10 now produces (decimal) 10
1.24 anton 40: Signs after the number prefix are now accepted, e.g, #-50.
1.20 anton 41: ' now only handles a single (x)char: 'ab is no longer accepted,
42: 'a' now produces (decimal) 97
1.31 ! anton 43: Unicode support (currently supports only uniform encoding):
! 44: added xchars words for dealing with variable-width multi-byte characters
! 45: provide 8bit (ISO Latin 1) and UTF-8 support for xchars
1.20 anton 46: New words:
1.28 anton 47: \C C-FUNCTION C-LIBRARY END-C-LIBRARY C-LIBRARY-NAME (libcc C interface)
48: LIB-ERROR (complements OPEN-LIB)
1.22 anton 49: OUTFILE-EXECUTE INFILE-EXECUTE BASE-EXECUTE (limited change of global state)
50: 16-bit and 32-bit memory acces: UW@ UL@ SW@ SL@ W! L! W@ L@ /W /L
51: NEXT-ARG SHIFT-ARGS (OS command-line argument processing)
52: NOTHROW (for backtrace control)
1.20 anton 53: FTRUNC FMOD (undocumented)
1.24 anton 54: SEE-CODE SEE-CODE-RANGE (show generated dynamic native code)
1.22 anton 55: Improvements/changes of existing words:
1.25 anton 56: S\", .\" now support \l, \m, \z, and limits hex and octal character specs.
57: OPEN-FILE with W/O no longer creates or truncates files (no compat. file)
1.28 anton 58: OPEN-LIB now understands ~ at the start, like OPEN-FILE.
1.22 anton 59: TRY...ENDTRY changed significantly, compatibility files available (see docs).
60: The disassembler (DISCODE) can now use gdb to disassemble code
61: Uninitialized defered words now give a warning when executed
62: Division is floored (disable with "configure --enable-force-cdiv")
63: Gforth (not gforth-fast) reports division by zero and overflow on division
64: on all platforms.
1.20 anton 65: Newly documented words:
66: S>NUMBER? S>UNUMBER?
1.25 anton 67: EKEY keypress names: K-LEFT K-RIGHT K-UP K-DOWN K-HOME K-END K-PRIOR
68: K-NEXT K-INSERT K-DELETE
1.20 anton 69: CLEARSTACKS
1.22 anton 70: FORM
1.20 anton 71: Environment variable GFORTHSYSTEMPREFIX (used by word SYSTEM and friends)
72: C interface:
73: exported symbols now start with "gforth_" (for referencing them from C code)
1.28 anton 74: libcc C function call interface (requires libtool and gcc at run-time)
75: alternative: undocumented libffi-based interface
1.20 anton 76: Libraries:
77: depth-changes.fs: report stack depth changes during interpretation
1.22 anton 78: ans-report.fs now reports CfV extensions
1.20 anton 79: fsl-util.4th: FSL support files (undocumented)
80: regexp.fs for regular expressions (undocumented)
81: complex.fs for complex numbers (undocumented)
82: fft.fs for Fast Fourier Transform (undocumented)
83: wf.fs, a Wiki implementation (undocumented)
84: httpd.fs, a web server (undocumented)
85: status.fs, show interpreter status in separate xterm (undocumented)
86: profile.fs for profiling (undocumented, incomplete)
1.22 anton 87: endtry-iferror.fs, recover-endtry.fs to ease the TRY change transition
1.24 anton 88: test/tester.fs: Now works with FP numbers (undocumented)
89: test/ttester.fs: Version of tester.fs with improved interface (T{...}T).
1.20 anton 90: compat library:
91: compat/execute-parsing.fs
92: Speed improvements:
1.28 anton 93: automatic performance tuning on building
1.20 anton 94: static stack caching (good speedup on PPC)
1.22 anton 95: mixed-precision division is now faster
1.20 anton 96: support for int128 types on AMD64
97: workarounds for gcc performance bugs (in particular, PR 15242)
1.24 anton 98: branch target alignment (good speedup on Alpha).
1.20 anton 99:
100:
1.18 anton 101: User-visible changes between 0.6.1 and 0.6.2:
102:
1.19 anton 103: Bug fixes (in particular, gforth-0.6.2 compiles with gcc-3.3)
104: New words: LATEST, LATESTXT (LASTXT deprecated)
105: Operating environment: Added optional support for a C interface built
106: on the ffcall libraries (more portable and powerful than the old
107: one, but still not documented). To use it, the ffcall libraries
108: have to be installed before building Gforth (see INSTALL).
109: Miscellaneous: Gforth-fast now uses static superinstructions (some
110: speedup on some platforms); generally this is transparent (apart
111: from the speedup), but there are lots of command-line options for
112: controlling the static superinstruction generation.
1.18 anton 113:
114:
1.16 anton 115: User-visible changes between 0.6.0 and 0.6.1:
116:
117: Bug fixes (installation on big-endian machines sometimes did not work)
118:
119:
1.9 anton 120: User-visible changes between 0.5.0 and 0.6.0:
121:
1.14 anton 122: Changes in behaviour:
1.10 anton 123:
1.14 anton 124: S": interpreted use now ALLOCATEs the string (they live until BYE).
125: Long word names (512MB on 32-bit systems) are now supported (change to
126: the header format).
127: New threaded code execution method: primitive-centric (allows the
128: following), hybrid direct/indirect threaded (easier portability),
129: with dynamic superinstructions (typical speedup on Athlon: factor
130: 2). New engine gforth-itc for dealing with some potential
1.16 anton 131: backwards-compatibility problems (see "Direct or Indirect Threaded?"
132: in the manual).
1.14 anton 133:
134: Operating environment:
135:
136: Default dictionary size is now 4MB.
1.10 anton 137: Large file support on OSs that support them (i.e., files with more
138: than 2GB on 32-bit machines).
1.15 anton 139: Gforth can now deal well with broken pipes in most situations.
1.10 anton 140: vi tags files can be built with tags.fs (usage like etags.fs).
1.14 anton 141: gforth.el mostly rewritten.
142: New image file format.
1.10 anton 143:
1.14 anton 144: New words:
1.10 anton 145:
1.14 anton 146: Keyboard input: EDIT-LINE K-PRIOR K-NEXT K-DELETE
147: File input: SLURP-FILE SLURP-FID
148: Programming tools: ID. .ID WORDLIST-WORDS SIMPLE-SEE
149: Conditional execution: [DEFINED] [UNDEFINED]
1.17 anton 150: Defining Words: CONST-DOES> ]]
1.14 anton 151: Input stream: PARSE-WORD EXECUTE-PARSING EXECUTE-PARSING-FILE
152: String comparison: STR= STR< STRING-PREFIX?
153: String literals: S\" .\" \"-PARSE
154: Floating point output: F.RDP F>STR-RDP F>BUF-RDP
1.9 anton 155:
1.14 anton 156: Miscellaneous:
1.9 anton 157:
158: Generalized prims2x.fs into Vmgen (see README.vmgen etc.); used the
159: new capabilities in prims (e.g., automatic handling of the return
160: stack and instruction stream).
1.10 anton 161:
1.9 anton 162:
1.8 anton 163: User-visible changes between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0:
164:
165: Changes in behaviour:
166:
167: There are now two engines: the fast engine (gforth-fast) is at least
168: as fast as gforth in earlier releases; the debugging engine (gforth)
169: supports precise backtracing for signals (e.g., illegal memory
170: access), but is slower by a factor of 1-2.
171: Block files now start at block 0 by default (instead of block 1). If
172: you have block files around, prepend 1024 bytes to convert them, or
173: do a "1 OFFSET !" to establish the old behaviour.
174: Gforth now does not translate newlines to LFs on reading. Instead,
175: READ-LINE now interprets LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines. Newlines on
176: output are in the OSs favourite format.
177: SEE now disassembles primitives (or hex-DUMPs the code if no
178: disassembler is available).
179: >HEAD (aka >NAME) now returns 0 (instead of the nt of ???) on failure.
180: Syntax of prim changed: stack effects are now surrounded by
181: parentheses, tabs are insignificant.
182:
183: Operating environment:
184:
185: Gforth now produces a backtrace when catching an exception.
186: On platforms supporting the Unix 98 SA_SIGINFO semantics, you get more
187: precise error reports for SIGSEGV and SIGFPE (e.g., "stack
188: underflow" instead of "Invalid memory address").
189: Gforth now produces exit code 1 if there is an error (i.e., an
190: uncaught THROW) in batch processing.
191: You can use "gforthmi --application ..." to build an image that
192: processes the whole command-line when invoked directly (instead of
193: through gforth -i).
194:
195: Ports:
196:
197: AIX.
198: 20% speedup on 604e under powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu,
199: 19%-29% speedup on Celeron with gcc-2.95.
200:
201: New words:
202:
203: Missing ANS Forth words: EKEY EKEY? EKEY>CHAR
204: Timing words: CPUTIME UTIME
205: Vector arithmetic: V* FAXPY
206: FP comparison: F~ABS F~REL
207: Deferred words: <IS> [IS]
208: Nested number output: <<# #>>
209: Exception handling: TRY RECOVER ENDTRY
210: Directory handling: OPEN-DIR READ-DIR CLOSE-DIR FILENAME-MATCH
211: Other: ]L PUSH-ORDER
212:
213: Miscellaneous:
214:
215: Significant extensions to the manual (added an introduction, among
216: other things), many of them due to a new team member: Neal Crook.
217: Added assemblers and disassemblers for 386, Alpha, MIPS (thanks to
218: contributions by Andrew McKewan, Bernd Thallner, and Christian
219: Pirker). Contributions of assemblers and disassemblers for other
220: architectures are welcome.
221:
222:
1.6 anton 223: User-visible changes between 0.3.0 and 0.4.0:
224:
225: Operating environment:
226:
227: Path handling: "." at the start of the path represents the directory
228: the nearest enclosing file resides in (if there is none: the working
229: directory). "~+" indicates the working directory. The default path
230: now has "." in front.
231: gforth and gforthmi is now more GNU standards compliant (wrt
232: command-line options).
233: New command-line-option: --die-on-signal
234: Errors are now directed to stderr.
235: Stdout is now unbuffered, if it is a tty.
236: User input device redirection (for filters) is now possible.
237:
238: Ports:
239:
240: Now runs on IRIX (and other MIPS-based systems without linker-flag -d).
241: Direct threading now works on PowerPC (20% speedup on 604e).
242: Better support for m68k (thanks to Andreas Schwab and Jorge Acereda).
243: It is possible to create executables that contain the image (for
244: non-OS systems).
1.7 pazsan 245:
246: Added a lot of embedded control (EC) stuff. Supported controllers and
247: small CPUs are Siemens C16x, 8086, 6502, Mixed-Mode's FPGA MISC, Bernd Paysan's
248: 4stack processor. Not finished: ShBoom alias PSC1000, H8, AVR.
1.6 anton 249:
250: New, changed, and removed words:
251:
252: Renamed F0 to FP0 (avoids unexpected behaviour in hex), added aliases
253: SP0, RP0, LP0 (recommended for future use) for S0, R0, L0.
254: Renamed PARSE-WORD into SWORD (PARSE-WORD is used with the meaning of
255: NAME in OpenBoot and dpans6 A.6.2.2008)
256: Added FPICK (suggested by Julian Noble).
257: Added EXCEPTION.
258: S" gforth" ENVIRONMENT? now produces the version-string.
259: Changed representation of types in struct package, and correspondingly
260: changed names.
261:
262: Miscellaneous:
263:
264: Plain text documentation is now available in doc/gforth.txt.
265: Documentation improvements.
266: Wordlist structure changed.
267: Added mini-oof.
268: Reorganized files: added directories and reorganized many files into
269: them; renamed files into 8.3 format to work with completely broken
270: systems (but there are again some files that won't work there).
271: Bug fixes.
272: Various changes without log information only known as mega-patches.
1.7 pazsan 273: Cross compiler now also supports compilation only for undefined or forward
274: referenced words. Plugins to support some native code generation
275: (for PSC1000).
1.6 anton 276: More files in the compat library.
277:
278:
279:
1.5 anton 280: User-visible changes between 0.2.1 and 0.3.0:
281:
282: Stack overflow detection by memory protection on most systems
283: (allocation with mmap).
284: gforth.fi is now fully relocatable.
285: fully relocatable images are now easier to create.
286: added primitives K and UNDER+.
287: Win32 support.
288: Improved support for embedded controllers and other deprived environments.
289: some bug fixes.
290: added concept index; other documentation improvements.
291:
1.6 anton 292:
293:
1.5 anton 294: User-visible changes between 0.2.0 and 0.2.1:
1.4 anton 295:
296: Bug fixes
297:
1.6 anton 298:
299:
1.5 anton 300: User-visible changes between 0.1beta and 0.2.0:
1.1 anton 301:
1.3 anton 302: Portability and Installation:
303:
1.1 anton 304: Support architectures with buggy long longs (alpha-dec-osf).
1.3 anton 305: Better support for DOS and other non-Unix systems.
1.1 anton 306: Size changes through the command line are passed to the image (and
307: saved with savesystem); the preamble specifies an interpreter and is
308: propagated by save-system.
1.3 anton 309:
310: Tools:
311:
312: Improved etags support.
313: more.fs allows output paging.
314: Added compat/ directory containing ANS implementations of Gforth features.
315: Added tiny multitasker (tasker.fs).
316: Added two alternatives for object-oriented programming: oof.fs, objects.fs.
317: Added ans-report.fs (reports which words are used from which wordset).
318:
319: New words:
320:
321: Changed POPEN and PCLOSE to OPEN-PIPE and CLOSE-PIPE.
322: Added FORM, ROWS, and COLS.
323: added primitives EMIT-FILE, STDOUT, STDERR.
324: Added TABLEs (case-sensitive wordlists).
325: added POSTPONE,.
326: Added the ability to combine arbitrary interpretation and compilation
327: semantics (INTERPRET/COMPILE:); state-smart words were generally
328: rewritten to use that mechanism.
329:
330: Changes to existing words:
331:
332: EMIT and TYPE now work through file words (and are redirectable).
1.1 anton 333: HEADER now stores the compilation wordlist in the header and REVEAL
334: reveals into that wordlist.
1.3 anton 335: changed behaviour of SYSTEM (no longer returns wretval, but puts it in
336: $?) added (SYSTEM) ( c_addr u -- wretval wior ).
1.1 anton 337: ' and ['] now give an error for compile-only words.
1.3 anton 338:
1.12 anton 339: -----
1.30 anton 340: Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997,1998,2000,2003,2006,2007,2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1.12 anton 341:
342: This file is part of Gforth.
343:
344: Gforth is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
345: modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
1.27 anton 346: as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3
1.12 anton 347: of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
348:
349: This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
350: but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
351: MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.#See the
352: GNU General Public License for more details.
353:
354: You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1.27 anton 355: along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
1.12 anton 356:
1.6 anton 357:
358: % Local Variables:
359: % fill-prefix: " "
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