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, backtraces, a decompiler and a powerful locals facility, and it even has a manual. Gforth combines traditional implementation techniques with newer techniques for portability and performance: its inner interpreter is direct threaded with several optimizations, but you can also use a traditional-style indirect threaded interpreter. Gforth is distributed under the GNU General Public license (see COPYING). Gforth runs under Unix, MS Windows, MacOS X, 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: alpha-dec-osf4.0d alpha-unknown-linux-gnu alphapca56-unknown-linux-gnu hppa1.1-unknown-linux-gnu hppa2.0n-hp-hpux11.00 hppa2.0w-hp-hpux11.11 i386-unknown-freebsd5.1 i686-pc-cygwin i686-pc-linux-gnu mips-sgi-irix6.5 mipsel-pc-linux-gnu powerpc-apple-darwin5.4 powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu sparc-sun-sunos4.1.4 sparc-unknown-linux-gnu Read INSTALL for installation instructions, or INSTALL.DOS for DOS, Windows, and OS/2, or INSTALL.BINDIST if you have a binary package. To start the system, just say `gforth' (after installing it). You can find new versions of Gforth at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gforth/ 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 also 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.org. To subscribe, send a mail to gforth-subscribe@chaossolutions.org@ChaosSolutions.org with: subscribe GForth as the first and only line within the message body. Submit bug reports through https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=addbug&group=gforth (whether you post them or not). - anton anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html ----- Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997,1998,2000,2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is part of Gforth. Gforth is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.#See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA.