File:  [gforth] / gforth / NEWS
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Sat Sep 23 18:20:18 2000 UTC (23 years, 6 months ago) by anton
Branches: MAIN
CVS tags: v0-5-0, HEAD
updated NEWS
minor changes

    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: 
   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).
   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.
   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.
  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).
  114: More files in the compat library.
  115: 
  116: 
  117: 
  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: 
  130: 
  131: 
  132: User-visible changes between 0.2.0 and 0.2.1:
  133: 
  134: Bug fixes
  135: 
  136: 
  137: 
  138: User-visible changes between 0.1beta and 0.2.0:
  139: 
  140: Portability and Installation:
  141: 
  142: Support architectures with buggy long longs (alpha-dec-osf).
  143: Better support for DOS and other non-Unix systems.
  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.
  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).
  171: HEADER now stores the compilation wordlist in the header and REVEAL
  172: reveals into that wordlist.
  173: changed behaviour of SYSTEM (no longer returns wretval, but puts it in
  174: $?)  added (SYSTEM) ( c_addr u -- wretval wior ).
  175: ' and ['] now give an error for compile-only words.
  176: 
  177: 
  178: % Local Variables:
  179: % fill-prefix: "  "

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