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 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, Win95, OS/2, 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:

alpha-dec-osf4.0d
alphaev56-unknown-linux-gnu
hppa1.1-hp-hpux10.20
i486-pc-linux-gnulibc1
i686-pc-linux-gnu
mips-dec-ultrix4.3
mips-sgi-irix6.2
powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1
sparc-sun-sunos4.1.4

Read INSTALL for installation instructions, or INSTALL.DOS for DOS,
Windows 95, and OS/2. Mail bug-gforth@gnu.org if you have problems.
To start the system, just say `gforth' (after installing it).

You can find new versions of Gforth at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gforth/
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 also 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 (include with "include <file>" from within
        gforth, or start with "gforth <file1> <file2> ...")
*.fi	Forth image files (start with "gforth -i <image file>")
*.fb	Forth blocks file (load with "use <block file> 1 load")
*.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 blocked.fb tasker.fs

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

Games:
tt.fs sokoban.fs

Test programs (for testing Forth systems):
test/*.fs

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

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

For discussions about Gforth, use the Usenet newsgroup
comp.lang.forth.  If you prefer not to post on Usenet, there is also a
mailing list: GForth@ChaosSolutions.org.  To subscribe, send a mail to
MDaemon@ChaosSolutions.org with:

subscribe GForth

as the first and only line within the message body.  Send bug reports
to bug-gforth@gnu.org (whether you post them or not).


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