Gforth

User-visible changes between 0.6.2 and 0.6.9 (up to 2007-06-01):

Installation:

support for DESTDIR, POST_INSTALL, INSTALL_SCRIPT

report performance and functionality problems at end of "make"

Bug fixes

Now works with address-space randomization.

The single-step debugger works again in some engines.

Many others.

Ports:

AMD64, ARM, IA-64 (Itanium): better performance

PPC: disassembler and assembler (32-bit)

Gforth EC: R8C, Lego NXT (complete?)

Invocation:

New flags --ignore-async-signals, --vm-commit (default overcommit)

Forth 200x:

extension queries (produce true for all implemented extensions)

REQUIRED etc. (not new)

DEFINED and UNDEFINED

PARSE-NAME (new name)

deferred words (new: DEFER@ DEFER! ACTION-OF)

Unicode support (incomplete, documentation probably not up-to-date):

added xchars words for dealing with variable-width multi-byte characters

provide 8bit (ISO Latin 1) and UTF-8 support for xchars

Number prefixes:

0x is a hex prefix: 0xff and 0XfF now produces (decimal) 255

# is a decimal prefix: #10 now produces (decimal) 10

' now only handles a single (x)char: 'ab is no longer accepted,

'a' now produces (decimal) 97

New words:

OUTFILE-EXECUTE INFILE-EXECUTE BASE-EXECUTE (limited change of global state)

16-bit and 32-bit memory acces: UW@ UL@ SW@ SL@ W! L! W@ L@ /W /L

NEXT-ARG SHIFT-ARGS (OS command-line argument processing)

NOTHROW (for backtrace control)

FTRUNC FMOD (undocumented)

Improvements/changes of existing words:

TRY...ENDTRY changed significantly, compatibility files available (see docs).

The disassembler (DISCODE) can now use gdb to disassemble code

Uninitialized defered words now give a warning when executed

Division is floored (disable with "configure --enable-force-cdiv")

Gforth (not gforth-fast) reports division by zero and overflow on division on all platforms.

Newly documented words:

S>NUMBER? S>UNUMBER?

EKEY keypress names: K-LEFT K-RIGHT K-UP K-DOWN K-HOME K-END K-PRIOR K-NEXT K-INSERT K-DELETE K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 K12 S-K1 S-K2 S-K3 S-K4 S-K5 S-K6 S-K7 S-K8 S-K9 S-K10 S-K11 S-K12

CLEARSTACKS

FORM

Environment variable GFORTHSYSTEMPREFIX (used by word SYSTEM and friends)

C interface:

exported symbols now start with "gforth_" (for referencing them from C code)

support for use of libffi (supplied with gcc) and

a C-compiler-based approach (requires C compiler at run-time) (incomplete).

Libraries:

depth-changes.fs: report stack depth changes during interpretation

ans-report.fs now reports CfV extensions

fsl-util.4th: FSL support files (undocumented)

regexp.fs for regular expressions (undocumented)

complex.fs for complex numbers (undocumented)

fft.fs for Fast Fourier Transform (undocumented)

wf.fs, a Wiki implementation (undocumented)

httpd.fs, a web server (undocumented)

status.fs, show interpreter status in separate xterm (undocumented)

profile.fs for profiling (undocumented, incomplete)

endtry-iferror.fs, recover-endtry.fs to ease the TRY change transition

compat library:

compat/execute-parsing.fs

Speed improvements:

static stack caching (good speedup on PPC)

mixed-precision division is now faster

support for int128 types on AMD64

workarounds for gcc performance bugs (in particular, PR 15242)

User-visible changes between 0.6.1 and 0.6.2:

Bug fixes

(in particular, gforth-0.6.2 compiles with gcc-3.3)

New words:

LATEST, LATESTXT (LASTXT deprecated)

Operating environment:

Added optional support for a C interface built on the ffcall libraries (more portable and powerful than the old one, but still not documented). To use it, the ffcall libraries have to be installed before building Gforth (see INSTALL).

Miscellaneous:

Gforth-fast now uses static superinstructions (some speedup on some platforms); generally this is transparent (apart from the speedup), but there are lots of command-line options for controlling the static superinstruction generation.

User-visible changes between 0.6.0 and 0.6.1:

Bug fixes (installation on big-endian machines sometimes did not work)

User-visible changes between 0.5.0 and 0.6.0:

Changes in behaviour:

• S": interpreted use now ALLOCATEs the string (they live until BYE).
• Long word names (512MB on 32-bit systems) are now supported (change to the header format).
• New threaded code execution method: primitive-centric (allows the following), hybrid direct/indirect threaded (easier portability), with dynamic superinstructions (typical speedup on Athlon: factor 2). New engine gforth-itc for dealing with some potential backwards-compatibility problems (see "Direct or Indirect Threaded?" in the manual).

Operating environment:

• Default dictionary size is now 4MB.
• Large file support on OSs that support them (i.e., files with more than 2GB on 32-bit machines).
• Gforth can now deal well with broken pipes in most situations.
• vi tags files can be built with tags.fs (usage like etags.fs).
• gforth.el mostly rewritten.
• New image file format.

New words:

• Keyboard input: EDIT-LINE K-PRIOR K-NEXT K-DELETE
• File input: SLURP-FILE SLURP-FID
• Programming tools: ID. .ID WORDLIST-WORDS SIMPLE-SEE
• Conditional execution: [DEFINED] [UNDEFINED]
• Defining Words: CONST-DOES> ]]
• Input stream: PARSE-WORD EXECUTE-PARSING EXECUTE-PARSING-FILE
• String comparison: STR= STR< STRING-PREFIX?
• String literals: S\" .\" \"-PARSE
• Floating point output: F.RDP F>STR-RDP F>BUF-RDP

Miscellaneous:

• Generalized prims2x.fs into Vmgen (see README.vmgen etc.); used the new capabilities in prims (e.g., automatic handling of the return stack and instruction stream).

User-visible changes between 0.4.0 and 0.5.0:

Changes in behaviour:

• There are now two engines: the fast engine (gforth-fast) is at least as fast as gforth in earlier releases; the debugging engine (gforth) supports precise backtracing for signals (e.g., illegal memory access), but is slower by a factor of 1-2.
• Block files now start at block 0 by default (instead of block 1). If you have block files around, prepend 1024 bytes to convert them, or do a 1 OFFSET ! to establish the old behaviour.
• Gforth now does not translate newlines to LFs on reading. Instead, READ-LINE now interprets LF, CR, and CRLF as newlines. Newlines on output are in the OSs favourite format.
• SEE now disassembles primitives (or hex- DUMPs the code if no disassembler is available).
• >HEAD (aka >NAME) now returns 0 (instead of the nt of ???) on failure.
• Syntax of prim changed: stack effects are now surrounded by parentheses, tabs are insignificant.

Operating environment:

• Gforth now produces a backtrace when catching an exception.
• On platforms supporting the Unix 98 SA_SIGINFO semantics, you get more precise error reports for SIGSEGV and SIGFPE (e.g., "stack underflow" instead of "Invalid memory address").
• Gforth now produces exit code 1 if there is an error (i.e., an uncaught THROW) in batch processing.
• You can use " gforthmi --application ..." to build an image that processes the whole command-line when invoked directly (instead of through gforth -i).

Ports:

• AIX.
• 20% speedup on 604e under powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu,
• 19%-29% speedup on Celeron with gcc-2.95.

New words:

• Missing ANS Forth words: EKEY EKEY? EKEY>CHAR
• Timing words: CPUTIME UTIME
• Vector arithmetic: V* FAXPY
• FP comparison: F~ABS F~REL
• Deferred words: [IS]

• Nested number output:

  <<# #>>
  

• Exception handling: TRY RECOVER ENDTRY
• Directory handling: OPEN-DIR READ-DIR CLOSE-DIR FILENAME-MATCH
• Other: ]L PUSH-ORDER

Miscellaneous:

• Significant extensions to the manual (added an introduction, among other things), many of them due to a new team member: Neal Crook.
• Added assemblers and disassemblers for 386, Alpha, MIPS (thanks to contributions by Andrew McKewan, Bernd Thallner, and Christian Pirker). Contributions of assemblers and disassemblers for other architectures are welcome.

User-visible changes between 0.3.0 and 0.4.0:

Operating environment:

• Path handling: "." at the start of the path represents the directory the nearest enclosing file resides in (if there is none: the working directory). "~+" indicates the working directory. The default path now has "." in front.
• gforth and gforthmi is now more GNU standards compliant (wrt command-line options).
• New command-line-option: --die-on-signal
• Errors are now directed to stderr.
• Stdout is now unbuffered, if it is a tty.
• User input device redirection (for filters) is now possible.

Ports:

• Now runs on IRIX (and other MIPS-based systems without linker-flag -d). Direct threading now works on PowerPC (20% speedup on 604e). Better support for m68k (thanks to Andreas Schwab and Jorge Acereda). It is possible to create executables that contain the image (for non-OS systems).
• Added a lot of embedded control (EC) stuff. Supported controllers and small CPUs are Siemens C16x, 8086, 6502, Mixed-Mode's FPGA MISC, Bernd Paysan's 4stack processor. Not finished: ShBoom alias PSC1000, H8, AVR.

New, changed, and removed words:

• Renamed F0 to FP0 (avoids unexpected behaviour in hex), added aliases SP0, RP0, LP0 (recommended for future use) for S0, R0, L0.
• Renamed PARSE-WORD into SWORD (PARSE-WORD is used with the meaning of NAME in OpenBoot and dpans6 A.6.2.2008)
• Added FPICK (suggested by Julian Noble).
• Added EXCEPTION.
• S" gforth" ENVIRONMENT? now produces the version-string.
• Changed representation of types in struct package, and correspondingly changed names.

Miscellaneous:

• Plain text documentation is now available in doc/gforth.txt. Documentation improvements.
• Wordlist structure changed.
• Added mini-oof.
• Reorganized files: added directories and reorganized many files into them; renamed files into 8.3 format to work with completely broken systems (but there are again some files that won't work there).
• Bug fixes.
• Various changes without log information only known as mega-patches. Cross compiler now also supports compilation only for undefined or forward referenced words. Plugins to support some native code generation (for PSC1000).
• More files in the compat library.