Win32Forth

The History of Win32Forth

History

[ Which is maintained as a historical curiosity; please see the rest of the doc for how it really is now. Original by Tom Zimmer ]

Andrew McKewan initially wrote the kernel for Win32Forth (mid 1994) in assembly language as a personal experiment in the process of bringing up a Forth under Microsoft WindowsNT. Win32Forth uses a (relatively) small wrapper or loader written in 'C' that loads the Forth image file and executes it. The wrapper provides some limited console I/O to support program development. Andrew also ported (re-wrote actually) the NEON OOP (Object Oriented Programming) support to simplify the interface to the windows operating system calls.

In late 1994, Andrew's "baby" kernel was turned over to me (Tom Zimmer) for possible use in porting a large data processing application from DOS into the WindowsNT environment. We had looked at and purchased what seemed the only available commercial Forth system at the time, but unfortunately it was not yet mature enough to handle our task or needs. I ported most of the tools and utilities from my public domain F-PC Forth system to Win32Forth to make the application porting task easier.

The Win32Forth system, derived from Andrew's personal work, and the public domain F-PC, has remained in the public domain Jim Schneider wrote the 486 prefix assembler for Win32Forth, included under the GNU public license. This is the only part of Win32Forth that is not truly public domain. Please read Jim's documents for details of its use in commercial applications: p-486asm.htm.

In early 1995, Robert Smith wrote the floating point support for Win32Forth. Robert is very experienced with such tasks, having written several floating point packages in the past, including two for F-PC. The floating point package includes support for both the eight byte and the ten byte floating point formats. Win32Forth took a side road into the area of using only absolute addresses during 1995, but many problems with compatibility with Windows95 and Win32s led me to return to relative addressing as a much more portable solution.

In January 1996, Andrew completed the "F83" style meta-compiler and forth source kernel for Win32Forth. This opened the door to further kernel development, including separated heads, and dual dictionaries. Version 3.1 released in March 1996, Includes 'Ctrl+F1' help on the ANS Forth words described in the DPANS94 document while in the WinView [now WinEd] editor. I hypertext compiled the DPANS94 without making any changes to the document by extending the hypertext compiler to recognize additional search word context. This version also has much better compatibility with Win32s running under OS/2 and Windows 3.1, due to corrections made to the memory management code in the wrapper.

In May 1996, the source level debugger interface to the WinView editor was completed. It is now possible to debug a Win32Forth application remotely, including; setting breakpoints, single step execution, and parameter monitoring. The requirement to be able to perform these operations is that the application be created with the "APPLICATION" program save facility rather than the "TURNKEY" facility so that the programs symbols are still available for remote debugger control.

July 1996, Enhancements to windows to allow them to each have their own menus, and enhancements to objects to allow the use of a dotted notation to access local data within an object. An updated version of Jim Schneider's assembler has also been included with this release. Compatibility with Win32s under Windows 3.1 and OS/2 has been retained, but you should be warned that Microsoft has stopped supporting Win32s in their latest version (4.2) of Visual C++. Future versions of Win32Forth may not be compatible with Win32s. I believe the hand writing is on the wall. It is time to start moving off of Windows 3.1 and onto Windows95 or WindowsNT. I don't know what you users of OS/2 will do. If IBM doesn't support the Win32 API directly, then you will soon lose access to programs developed for Windows95 and WindowsNT.

[ In fact, OS/2 died, and Win32Forth no longer supports Win32s. It does support Windows95/98/ME/NT3.51/NT4/2000 and XP, although some of the support for Windows 95 and NT is academic; there appear to be no users currently to let us test it ]

Version 3.2 released July 1996, included enhancements to Windows support including separate menus for each application window. Added documentation (in the file Win32For.PRV) on how to create a DLL with Win32Forth. Added an Optimizer (in the form of OPTIMIZE.F) to Win32Forth that allows code sections to be compiled to assembly language to improve performance. Fixed various minor bugs in floating point number support. Added data structure support (in the form of RECORD:) for use inside classes. Added dotted notation support to classes and sub objects.

Version 3.3 Released October 1996, includes a new Font class, making font manipulation in an application more manageable. I have started adding HTML support to WinView, so it may eventually be used for documentation. Bill Muench donated multi-tasking support. Additional changes were made to enahnce ANS compatibility. Andrew donated a DLL that allowed the removal of over 2000 Windows constants. The DLL is linked into NUMBER, so it can be used to lookup over 8000 Windows constants without them having to be in the Forth dictionary. Extensive documentation has been added to FSAVE, TURNKEY and APPLICATION, the words used to create programs.

Version 3.5 Released mid 1997, is primarily a bug fix release, but several enhancements to the WinView editor, now allow it to edit multiple files in memory at the same time (you need more memory), and I have fixed the screen update code, to improve the redisplay performance, which several people complained about.

During most of 1997, and the first half of 1998, Win32Forth took a jaunt into the world of commercial Forth systems. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it, Win32Forth proved to be too large and complex for the commercial vendor to use and document. In mid 1998, Win32Forth was restored to myself, and it has enjoyed further, though limited development since that time.

[ Addendum: Tom Zimmer quit maintaining Win32Forth and it led a secret life for several years going through permutations as versions 4 and 5. After some time and through the persistence and endurance of John Peters and a small group of die-hards, Win32Forth evolved into a separate-directory system (by Rainbow Sally) which offered promise of being a cleaner more friendly environment for beginners and developers with some primitive batch file tools for developers to share/test and modify their systems efficiently. Simultaneously and independently Alex McDonald had been working on removing the C wrapper from the kernel (as sort of a hobby) which is necessary to take total control of the Meta Compile process to Forth itself in the outstanding tradition of Laxen and Perry, and which will allow compilation of stand- alone executable Windows applications. With the continued support of Dirk Busch, Ezra Boyce, George Hubert and others, and a splendid CVS provided by Ron Aaron, Alex McDonald has taken up the responsibility of maintaining, coordinating and generally irritating other members of the group. ]

Document $Id: p-history.htm,v 1.1 2004/12/21 00:18:56 alex_mcdonald Exp $