Annotation of gforth/NEWS, revision 1.8

1.8     ! anton       1: User-visible changes between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0:
        !             2: 
        !             3: Changes in behaviour:
        !             4: 
        !             5: There are now two engines: the fast engine (gforth-fast) is at least
        !             6:   as fast as gforth in earlier releases; the debugging engine (gforth)
        !             7:   supports precise backtracing for signals (e.g., illegal memory
        !             8:   access), but is slower by a factor of 1-2.
        !             9: Block files now start at block 0 by default (instead of block 1).  If
        !            10:   you have block files around, prepend 1024 bytes to convert them, or
        !            11:   do a "1 OFFSET !" to establish the old behaviour.
        !            12: Gforth now does not translate newlines to LFs on reading.  Instead,
        !            13:   READ-LINE now interprets LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines.  Newlines on
        !            14:   output are in the OSs favourite format.
        !            15: SEE now disassembles primitives (or hex-DUMPs the code if no
        !            16:   disassembler is available).
        !            17: >HEAD (aka >NAME) now returns 0 (instead of the nt of ???) on failure.
        !            18: Syntax of prim changed: stack effects are now surrounded by
        !            19:   parentheses, tabs are insignificant.
        !            20: 
        !            21: Operating environment:
        !            22: 
        !            23: Gforth now produces a backtrace when catching an exception.
        !            24: On platforms supporting the Unix 98 SA_SIGINFO semantics, you get more
        !            25:   precise error reports for SIGSEGV and SIGFPE (e.g., "stack
        !            26:   underflow" instead of "Invalid memory address").
        !            27: Gforth now produces exit code 1 if there is an error (i.e., an
        !            28:   uncaught THROW) in batch processing.
        !            29: You can use "gforthmi --application ..." to build an image that
        !            30:   processes the whole command-line when invoked directly (instead of
        !            31:   through gforth -i).
        !            32: 
        !            33: Ports:
        !            34: 
        !            35: AIX.
        !            36: 20% speedup on 604e under powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu,
        !            37: 19%-29% speedup on Celeron with gcc-2.95.
        !            38: 
        !            39: New words:
        !            40: 
        !            41: Missing ANS Forth words: EKEY EKEY? EKEY>CHAR
        !            42: Timing words: CPUTIME UTIME
        !            43: Vector arithmetic: V* FAXPY
        !            44: FP comparison: F~ABS F~REL
        !            45: Deferred words: <IS> [IS]
        !            46: Nested number output: <<# #>>
        !            47: Exception handling: TRY RECOVER ENDTRY
        !            48: Directory handling: OPEN-DIR READ-DIR CLOSE-DIR FILENAME-MATCH
        !            49: Other: ]L PUSH-ORDER
        !            50: 
        !            51: Miscellaneous:
        !            52: 
        !            53: Significant extensions to the manual (added an introduction, among
        !            54:   other things), many of them due to a new team member: Neal Crook.
        !            55: Added assemblers and disassemblers for 386, Alpha, MIPS (thanks to
        !            56:   contributions by Andrew McKewan, Bernd Thallner, and Christian
        !            57:   Pirker).  Contributions of assemblers and disassemblers for other
        !            58:   architectures are welcome.
        !            59: 
        !            60: 
1.6       anton      61: User-visible changes between 0.3.0 and 0.4.0:
                     62: 
                     63: Operating environment:
                     64: 
                     65: Path handling: "." at the start of the path represents the directory
                     66:   the nearest enclosing file resides in (if there is none: the working
                     67:   directory). "~+" indicates the working directory.  The default path
                     68:   now has "." in front.
                     69: gforth and gforthmi is now more GNU standards compliant (wrt
                     70:   command-line options).
                     71: New command-line-option: --die-on-signal
                     72: Errors are now directed to stderr.
                     73: Stdout is now unbuffered, if it is a tty.
                     74: User input device redirection (for filters) is now possible.
                     75: 
                     76: Ports:
                     77: 
                     78: Now runs on IRIX (and other MIPS-based systems without linker-flag -d).
                     79: Direct threading now works on PowerPC (20% speedup on 604e).
                     80: Better support for m68k (thanks to Andreas Schwab and Jorge Acereda).
                     81: It is possible to create executables that contain the image (for
                     82:   non-OS systems).
1.7       pazsan     83: 
                     84: Added a lot of embedded control (EC) stuff. Supported controllers and
                     85: small CPUs are Siemens C16x, 8086, 6502, Mixed-Mode's FPGA MISC, Bernd Paysan's
                     86: 4stack processor. Not finished: ShBoom alias PSC1000, H8, AVR.
1.6       anton      87: 
                     88: New, changed, and removed words:
                     89: 
                     90: Renamed F0 to FP0 (avoids unexpected behaviour in hex), added aliases
                     91:   SP0, RP0, LP0 (recommended for future use) for S0, R0, L0.
                     92: Renamed PARSE-WORD into SWORD (PARSE-WORD is used with the meaning of
                     93:   NAME in OpenBoot and dpans6 A.6.2.2008)
                     94: Added FPICK (suggested by Julian Noble).
                     95: Added EXCEPTION.
                     96: S" gforth" ENVIRONMENT? now produces the version-string.
                     97: Changed representation of types in struct package, and correspondingly
                     98:   changed names.
                     99: 
                    100: Miscellaneous:
                    101: 
                    102: Plain text documentation is now available in doc/gforth.txt.
                    103: Documentation improvements.
                    104: Wordlist structure changed.
                    105: Added mini-oof.
                    106: Reorganized files: added directories and reorganized many files into
                    107:   them; renamed files into 8.3 format to work with completely broken
                    108:   systems (but there are again some files that won't work there).
                    109: Bug fixes.
                    110: Various changes without log information only known as mega-patches.
1.7       pazsan    111: Cross compiler now also supports compilation only for undefined or forward
                    112: referenced words. Plugins to support some native code generation
                    113: (for PSC1000).
1.6       anton     114: More files in the compat library.
                    115: 
                    116: 
                    117: 
1.5       anton     118: User-visible changes between 0.2.1 and 0.3.0:
                    119: 
                    120: Stack overflow detection by memory protection on most systems
                    121:        (allocation with mmap).
                    122: gforth.fi is now fully relocatable.
                    123: fully relocatable images are now easier to create.
                    124: added primitives K and UNDER+.
                    125: Win32 support.
                    126: Improved support for embedded controllers and other deprived environments.
                    127: some bug fixes.
                    128: added concept index; other documentation improvements.
                    129: 
1.6       anton     130: 
                    131: 
1.5       anton     132: User-visible changes between 0.2.0 and 0.2.1:
1.4       anton     133: 
                    134: Bug fixes
                    135: 
1.6       anton     136: 
                    137: 
1.5       anton     138: User-visible changes between 0.1beta and 0.2.0:
1.1       anton     139: 
1.3       anton     140: Portability and Installation:
                    141: 
1.1       anton     142: Support architectures with buggy long longs (alpha-dec-osf).
1.3       anton     143: Better support for DOS and other non-Unix systems.
1.1       anton     144: Size changes through the command line are passed to the image (and
                    145: saved with savesystem); the preamble specifies an interpreter and is
                    146: propagated by save-system.
1.3       anton     147: 
                    148: Tools:
                    149: 
                    150: Improved etags support.
                    151: more.fs allows output paging.
                    152: Added compat/ directory containing ANS implementations of Gforth features.
                    153: Added tiny multitasker (tasker.fs).
                    154: Added two alternatives for object-oriented programming: oof.fs, objects.fs.
                    155: Added ans-report.fs (reports which words are used from which wordset).
                    156: 
                    157: New words:
                    158: 
                    159: Changed POPEN and PCLOSE to OPEN-PIPE and CLOSE-PIPE.
                    160: Added FORM, ROWS, and COLS.
                    161: added primitives EMIT-FILE, STDOUT, STDERR.
                    162: Added TABLEs (case-sensitive wordlists).
                    163: added POSTPONE,.
                    164: Added the ability to combine arbitrary interpretation and compilation
                    165: semantics (INTERPRET/COMPILE:); state-smart words were generally
                    166: rewritten to use that mechanism.
                    167: 
                    168: Changes to existing words:
                    169: 
                    170: EMIT and TYPE now work through file words (and are redirectable).
1.1       anton     171: HEADER now stores the compilation wordlist in the header and REVEAL
                    172: reveals into that wordlist.
1.3       anton     173: changed behaviour of SYSTEM (no longer returns wretval, but puts it in
                    174: $?)  added (SYSTEM) ( c_addr u -- wretval wior ).
1.1       anton     175: ' and ['] now give an error for compile-only words.
1.3       anton     176: 
1.6       anton     177: 
                    178: % Local Variables:
                    179: % fill-prefix: "  "

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