Gforth is a fast and portable implementation of the ANS Forth language. It works nicely with the Emacs editor, offers some nice features such as input completion and history and a powerful locals facility, and it even has (the beginnings of) a manual. Gforth employs traditional implementation techniques: its inner innerpreter is indirect or direct threaded. Gforth is distributed under the GNU General Public license (see COPYING). Gforth runs under Unix, Win95, OS/2, and DOS and should not be hard to port to other systems supported by GCC. This version has been tested successfully on the following platforms: checking host system type... alpha-dec-osf4.0b checking host system type... alphaev56-unknown-linux-gnu checking host system type... hppa1.1-hp-hpux10.20 checking host system type... i486-pc-linux-gnulibc1 checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu checking host system type... mips-dec-ultrix4.3 checking host system type... mips-sgi-irix6.2 checking host system type... powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu checking host system type... sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1 checking host system type... sparc-sun-sunos4.1.4 Read INSTALL for installation instructions, or INSTALL.DOS for DOS, Windows 95, and OS/2. Mail bug-gforth@gnu.org if you have problems. To start the system, just say `gforth' (after installing it). You can find new versions of Gforth at prep.ai.mit.edu and its mirrors or at http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/ or ftp://ftp.complang.tuwien.ac.at/pub/forth/gforth/ The latter site contains binary distributions of Gforth for some popular platforms. If you want to work on Gforth, mail me. Tasks to be done can be found in ToDo; but if you would like to do something not mentioned there, it's ok, too. In any case, we would like to hear what you are doing. The most important tasks IMO are the missing ANS Forth words, the documentation and the foreign language interface for C. On popular request, here are the meanings of unusual file extensions: *.fs Forth stream source file (include with "include " from within gforth, or start with "gforth ...") *.fi Forth image files (start with "gforth -i ") *.fb Forth blocks file (load with "use 1 load") *.i C include files *.ds documenation source *TAGS etags files A number of Forth source files are included in this package that are not necessary for building Gforth. Not all of them are mentioned in the rest of the documentation, so here's a short overview: Add-ons: code.fs random.fs more.fs ansi.fs colorize.fs oof.fs oofsampl.fs objects.fs blocked.fb tasker.fs Utilities: ans-report.fs etags.fs glosgen.fs filedump.fs Games: tt.fs sokoban.fs Test programs (for testing Forth systems): test/*.fs Benchmarks: bubble.fs siev.fs matrix.fs fib.fs ANS Forth implementations of Gforth extensions: compat/*.fs other.fs For discussions about Gforth, use the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.forth. If you prefer not to post on Usenet, there is also a mailing list: GForth@ChaosSolutions.com. To subscribe, send a mail to MDaemon@ChaosSolutions.com with: subscribe GForth as the first and only line within the message body. Send bug reports to bug-gforth@gnu.ai.mit.edu (whether you post them or not). - anton anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html