Win32Forth
Win32Forth
Release
Notes for version 6.10.05
, subscriptions at
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/win32forth-cvs
Back to SourceForge! We're grateful to Ron Aaron, who provided us with a bug tracking system and a full CVS for a considerable period. Unfortunately, due to several successful hacking attempts on the CVSTrak bug tracker, and because of the risk to the CVS source, a decision was made to return to SF for CVS use for the forseeable future. We're grateful to Ron for his efforts to keep the show on the road. We're disappointed that a single lone script-kiddy could cause so much damage to our project. The hacking attempts and the move to SF caused us to loose several months worth of change log, so the code committed to the SF CVS is missing detailed change information from October 16, 2003 (version 6.08.00) to December 21, 2004 (base commit to SF). As a result, the changes documented here are considerably less detailed than we would wish. Our little experiment in truly open open-source has ended; SF is more secure, but more difficult to use, and not as open as we would like.
6.10 is a significant update from 6.08, but the basic philosophy of ANS Forth compliance and trying to support as much legacy version 4.2 code as possible is still our primary goal.
The documentation has been beefed up considerably, and is now almost all HTML based.
Professor Julian V. Noble
has kindly allowed us
to distribute his "A Beginner's Guide to Forth"
and some of his formula translation source code.
Anton Ertl
has given his permission
to modify the
documentation for gforth
under the GNU Free
Documentation License; work is currently underway on it. We are grateful to them
and other contributors.
Help messages now more closely conform to ANS
standard; the help system can be loaded with the word help-system.
Win32Forth now produces native executables (.EXEs) for Windows. The original
system of using a wrapper that provided console facilities and loaded a
relocatable image has been changed in favour of a native executable and a set of
supporting DLLs (still written in C) that provide the console. The effect of
this change is to make Win32Forth a class 1 Forth (a definition of Forth
addressing mechanisms developed by
Michael L Gassanenko
); effectively, all
addresses in Win32forth are absolute, and the return stack and other address
based variables and values are real addresses, not relative addresses.
This means that rel>abs and abs>rel are no longer
required. The advantages are significant;
Other than that, there are no end-user changes required;
FSAVE, TURNKEY and
APPLICATION work without change.
Support is provided for multiple threads of execution in Win32Forth. Many changes have been made to the internals to make end-user words thread safe without requiring end user code changes to support it. Currently, how to invoke words as threads is poorly documented.
Specifically, for Win32Forth only, the assembler is now issued under the LGPL, not the GPL. Several small changes have been made;
A large number of bugs have been fixed.
The bug in \ which was causing the stack check warnings to try to print 4,000,000 spaces if the line has a comment has been fixed..
REPRESENT has been modified so zero is output as 0.0e0 by FS.
SYNONYM now leaves the new name as hidden if the old name isn't found. Also it correctly finds an earlier version of old name (if it's in the search order) where the two names are the same and the current and context vocabularies are also the same.
LOCALS-INIT has been modified not to throw an error when used in control structures, since this was causing problems when values where placed on the stack by the program, while compiling.
Document $Id: p-relnotes.6.10.htm,v 1.6 2006/10/30 12:01:42 georgeahubert Exp $