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> [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.
