Prospectus for John Cowan's Joy1

John Cowan's Joy1 is essentially the old prototype of Joy with the following additions:

• Floats (real numbers) as a new datatype, together with numerous new functions over floats.
• Files as a datatype, together with some common functions for manipulating files and doing I/O.
• Some new string functions. Also, on most platforms, an option to include garbage collection for strings.
• Some bugs in the old prototype have been fixed. Portability has been further increased. Joy1 will still compile and run with any strictly conforming ISO C compiler.

The currently supported platforms for the general garbage collector include Unix/Linux/*BSD on i386/Alpha/SPARC/SGI/HP, OS/2, Win32 native/Cygwin/DJGPP, and perhaps Macintosh. One system known not to work is OpenVMS (here the 4 C-files have to be compiled and linked in the usual manner). Joy1 has not yet been built on all these systems.

It is intended that the new implementation become known as Joy1, and that the earlier prototype, now Joy0, should gradually fade away. However, for compatiblity reasons the prototype Joy0 C sources have been updated (16-JUN-01).

I am enormously grateful to John for his work.