READ.ME for Win32forth 4.2 Release Date: March 10th, 2000 Tom Zimmer
Overview:
Win32Forth is a public domain Forth language development system that was
written to solve a specific problem, that is the porting of a very large
commercial data processing application into the WindowsNT environment. This
project has been successfully completed.
Documentation:
Win32Forth has some documentation, consisting of the help files listed under
the Help menu after you start Win32Forth. If you find that it will require
too much of your time to become familiar with Win32Forth, then you should
consider an alternative development environemnt. Writing applications for
the Windows environemnt is a difficult process, Microsoft is attempting to
solve this problem with programs like Visual Basic, but the amount of
information you as an individual need to assimilate is truely staggering.
Win32Forth doesn't make this any easier, you still need to learn a lot, and
then learn Win32Forth as well.
Bugs:
Win32Forth is NOT bug free. It never will be. It is too large and
complicated for me or anyone else to ever find all the bugs that can be
hidden within it. As I become aware of bugs, I try to fix them, but some
things are better not fixed, so beware, there are definite limits to
Win32Forth's ability to crash gracefully.
Loading:
If you have gotten to here, and decided to try Win32Forth, then it is time to
load it onto your system.
Win32Forth is provided in an executable installation archive file called
W32FOR42.EXE Win32Forth is installed into a single directory, so deleting
Win32Forth from your hard disk requires that you simply delete the
installation directory, and then delete the group of icons that were created
during installation.
The Installation program W32FOR42.EXE will install Win32Forth for Windows95,
Windows98 and WindowsNT into the directory of your choice. It will also create
a Win32Forth program group with the following icons in it;
Win32Forth The full Forth development environment
Make Win32Forth Extends FKERNEL to Win32Forth from source
Meta Compile Kernel Builds the kernel, FKERNEL.IMG from source
WinView Editor Starts WinView on a blank file
Win32Forth Release Notes Documents recent changes to Win32Forth
Rebuilding the Win32Forth FKERNEL.EXE file:
Normally you will not need to rebuild the wrapper FKERNEL.EXE, but you
can do so if you have the appropriate tools.
To rebuild the FKERNEL.EXE program you will need Visual C++ Version
2.2, (see WIN32FOR.MAK) or Symantec C++ Version 7.2 (see FKERNEL.PRJ, but it
hasn't been tried in a while) for Windows NT or Windows 95.
Notes:
Read the file WIN32FOR.NEW for additional notes on late breaking changes
and improvements in Win32Forth.