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.