retroforth/RELEASE-NOTES

# RetroForth 2021.1 Release Notes

## Core Language

* `choose` (and other conditionals) now treat non-zero as `TRUE` and
  zero as `FALSE` instead of requiring a flag of -1 for `TRUE`
* add \^ (ASCII ESC) to escape sequences in `s:format`

## I/O

* improvements to some of the pipe related words in the `unix:`
  namespace
* reduced code size for each device handler slightly
* added `abort` to Retro on Unix

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## Toolchain

### Makefile

* Small adjustments to reduce build time

### C

* retro-unu

  - now supports user defined code and test block delimiters (C)

* retro-muri

  - supports changes from retro-unu
  - now has separate passes for each step of the assembly process
  - removed some unused variables

### Python

* retro-amalgamate.py added to generate a single file Python source
* faster retro-extend.py
* added retro-embedimage.py

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## VM

### nga-c

* reduced redundancy across the various implementations in C
* removed an unused function

### nga-python

* now written using classes
* no longer limited to 32 or 64 bit cells
* uses Python functions to shadow some Retro words for better
  performance
* caches the Retro dictionary to improve lookup performance
* embeds image as a Python source
* now supports `-f`, `-i`, and `-u` command line parameters
* improved error handling for invalid addresses

----

## Examples

* added "2020 Advent of Code", days 1-5
* added palindromic numbers detection (SVFIG challenge)
* added bindings over curl
* added muri with direct use of hex values
* refactoring & general cleanups in Atua-WWW
* Atua-WWW now ignores ?... appended to URLs