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 and a powerful locals
facility, and it even has (the beginnings of) a manual. Gforth employs
traditional implementation techniques: its inner innerpreter is
indirect or direct threaded.  Gforth is distributed under the GNU
General Public license (see COPYING).

Gforth runs under Unix 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: i486-unknown-linuxaout, i586-unknown-linux,
alpha-dec-osf3.2, mips-dec-ultrix4.3, sparc-sun-sunos4.1.4,
sparc-unknown-netbsd1.2 (configured with ac_cv_sizeof_long_long=0, see
INSTALL), hppa1.1-hp-hpux9.05, hppa1.1-hp-hpux10.20, Windows 95 using
DJGPP 2.0, and OS/2 3.0 using EMX 0.9c, the latter with manual help
to finish compilation.

Read INSTALL for installation instructions, or INSTALL.DOS for DOS and
OS/2. Mail bug-gforth@gnu.ai.mit.edu if you have problems.  To start
the system, just say `gforth' (after installing it).

You can find new versions of Gforth at prep.ai.mit.edu 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 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
*.fi	Forth image files
*.fb	Forth blocks file
*.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

Utilities:
ans-report.fs etags.fs glosgen.fs filedump.fs

Games:
tt.fs sokoban.fs

Test programs (for testing Forth systems):
tester.fs coretest.fs postponetest.fs dbltest.fs
checkans.fs wordsets.fs

Benchmarks:
bubble.fs siev.fs matrix.fs fib.fs sieve.fs

ANS Forth implementations of Gforth extensions:
compat/*.fs other.fs


- anton
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
