Montag, 14. Juni 2010

Beta Version

There have been hassles with Anti-Virus software since a while, detecting Win32Forth as virus infected. Seems to be that these companies do not like a really sophisticated programming language implementation, or what else, I don't know.

It has been reported that this is not the case with the new Win32Forth version 6.14.

Therefore I decided to recompile visualFORTH with Win32Forth version 6.14, to give more people the possibility to use visualFORTH. Another reason for this step was to overcome the restriction that visualFORTH can only be used with Windows XP.

A lot of internal functions of Win32Forth have been changed or renewed to make version 6.14 now Win32Forth: a 32 Bit Forth for Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/W2K/XP/VISTA and WIN7 - and there is hope that visualFORTH version 1.14.14, released today, will not only run on Windows XP, but on VISTA and WIN7, too.

Up to now the visualFORTH Beta is only tested on Windows XP, and there it does very well. All previously developed programs using visualFORTH are still running under the new version. As soon as I get the message that somebody has checked visualFORTH version 1.14.14 on VISTA or WIN7, I will forward this message.

As mentioned before, a lot of internals are different between Win32Forth version 6.12 and Win32Forth version 6.14, but porting visualFORTH to the new Win32Forth version 6.14 needed less than a day, using all my experience I gained meanwhile. But I can tell you, before I started, I thought I never will get this done, it was complicated. I am writing this because I am pretty sure that this porting was really fast. And I know it could be this fast because the programming language is Forth.

I call the new visualFORTH a Beta version, because it is doing well since a long time, and to show that there is a difference between visualFORTH version 0.01.14 and visualFORTH version 1.14.14 - it is the underlying Win32Forth version, which is not compatible for everything. I had to change a lot when doing the porting. I guess I can call this "Rapid Prototyping", because it was really fast.

The new version number consists of 3 parts:

1. - Beta (before this version it was zero for the Alpha version)
14. - based on Win32Forth 6.14 (omitting the 6)
14 - fourteenth version of visualFORTH

These 14 versions are the steps I have done by adding features to visualFORTH, but visualFORTH could be used to easily develop GUI's from the start of the first version, and all programs are still running on the newest version. There was only one change long ago, when a lot of features had been added at the same time and therefore records for storing data had to be changed, but this is a long time ago now. There will be features added in the future, especially on demand - feel free to ask for a feature - but updates with new features only will be patches which shall work on both versions of visualFORTH. That means, if you have visualFORTH Alpha running on your computer, you do not have to install the Beta version now. At this time today the features on both versions are the same. If there are problems, please let me know.

One remarkable milestone was the OneClickTurnkeyEXE.

My goal is that programs developed with an earlier version of visualFORTH always shall run with the newest version, too. I do thoroughly check, but I need feedback when you find a problem.

Enjoy using visualFORTH!