ecl/src/CHANGELOG

ECL 11.7.1:
==========

* Bugs fixed:

 - Fixed several dozens of typos.

 - ENSURE-DIRECTORIES-EXIST did not work properly with logical pathnames.

 - EXT:SET-LIMIT with option EXT:FRAME-STACK corrupted the frame stack.

 - The array of boot-time symbols is fixed and independent of the features
   that are compiled in. This is essential for cross-compilation and also
   for sharing C code among different builds.

 - Fixed externalization of bytecodes with literals that need MAKE-LOAD-FORM.

 - When parsing a floating point number at least one digit should be
   present. ECL parsed +.e0 as +0.0e0, instead of as a symbol.

 - For OS X Lion we need a newer version of the garbage collector. Since the
   maintainers' advise is that we use the unstable tree, we have made a copy
   and use it _only_ for this port (src/gc-unstable).

* Visible changes:

 - When printing error messages, the condition type is shown (M. Mondor)

 - SI:TOP-LEVEL, when invoked without arguments, does not process the
   command line.

 - The command line used by EXT:PROCESS-COMMAND-ARGS is now by default
   the one stored in *COMMAND-ARGS*, and this may be "cleared" by the
   user.

 - SOCKET-MAKE-STREAM now accepts an :ELEMENT-TYPE argument.

 - When --enable-rpath is used in combination with --with-gmp-prefix, then the
   path of the GMP library is hardcoded into ECL. If the remaining libraries
   (GC, libffi) are in a similar location this will make ECL work without
   further flags, and without modifying LD_LIBRARY_PATH or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH.

 - All arguments after the '--' command line option are stored in a global
   variable, ext:*unprocessed-ecl-command-args*.

 - In the rules passed to ext:process-command-args, :stop now implies that all
   remaining arguments including the current one are collected and passed to
   the rule code. An example of use of this option
      ;; Collect all arguments _after_ the command line option --
      ("--" 1 (setf ext:*unprocessed-ecl-command-args* (rest 1)) :stop)
      ;; Collect all arguments including the first unknown one
      ("*DEFAULTS*" 1 (setf ext:*unprocessed-ecl-command-args* 1) :stop)

 - ECL will always build, by default, with support for Unicode strings.

 - EXT:GETENV coerces its input argument to type BASE-STRING.

 - The garbage collector would reset the counters on every call to
   SI:GC-STATS. This made nested TIME calls not to work, as the statistics of
   the inner call would spoil those of the outer one. This has been fixed.

 - ECL implements CDR 6 (ext:*inspector-hook*) as described in
   http://cdr.eurolisp.org/document/6/index.html

 - ECL implements CDR 5 (Sub-interval Numerical Types) as described in
   http://cdr.eurolisp.org/document/5/index.html

 - ECL ships libffi together with its source tree, much like GMP and GC.

 - On POSIX platforms ECL traps SIGCHLD and uses it to update the status of
   external processes.

 - DIRECTORY accepts the keyword argument :RESOLVE-SYMLINKS.

 - Compiling files now generates C headers with the extension "eclh". This
   is done to avoid accidentally generating header files with the same name
   as those in the C library. Take for instance, float.lsp -> float.h.

 - ECL no longer relies on "git" being installed to gather the git commit id
   and setting (ext:lisp-implementation-vcs-id).

 - When building shared and statically linked libraries, ECL creates an
   extra function that performs two tasks: initializing ECL if it wasn't done
   before, and initializing the library. This can be used to create standalone
   libraries to be linked with other programs. The name of the function typically
   begins with main_dll or main_lib but it is output by ECL on screen.

 - Hash tables do no longer have implicit locking. All complex structures in
   ECL (arrays, hash tables, objects) should be dealt with sufficient care on
   the user side, just as in other programming languages, making use of
   WITH-LOCK and similar facilities.

 - In OPEN the default format is :UTF-8 for Unicode builds and :LATIN-1 for
   others, and the stream element type is always CHARACTER by default.

 - Function read_VV is renamed to ecl_init_module()

 - Initialization of random number generator is done using only 16 bytes from
   /dev/urandom (Phillip Marek).

 - Each thread keeps a copy of the process sigmask (POSIX) and it is inherited
   by children thread. The sigmask can be manipulated by the function
   EXT:CATCH-SIGNAL which has the signature
	(ext:catch-signal signal-code action &key process)
   The ACTION is one of :IGNORE, :DEFAULT, :CATCH, determining what ECL does
   when it receives the signal, or it can be :MASK/:UNMASK to determine whether
   the process is blocking the signal or not. The optional argument :PROCESS
   only applies to :MASK/:UNMASK and it can be the current process, some
   process that has not been activated or any other value (indicating that
   the function has a global effect, as sigprocmask).

 - Allocate executable memory using libffi instead of using just the
   Boehm-Weiser garbage collector.

 - In bytecodes.h, deactivate the threaded interpreter when using the LLVM
   compiler. The problem is that llvm-gcc disguises itself as GCC but it is
   not capable of properly compiling the jump table.

 - Implemented SEQUENCE-STREAMs, which are input/output streams defined on some
   specialized array type. The functions to create them are
     (ext:make-sequence-input-stream vector &key :start :end :external-format)
     (ext:make-sequence-output-stream vector &key :external-format)
        * If the array is a string, it is a character stream.
          - When no external format is supplied, it defaults to the usual encoding
            and the stream behaves like a string stream.
          - When an external format is supplied, each character in the string
            is interpreted as a single byte and used for that external format.
        * If the array is specialized over integers and EXTERNAL-FORMAT is NIL
          the stream is a binary stream.
        * Otherwise, it is a binary string but READ/WRITE-CHAR may be used on it.
   Reading and writing does not preserve the original word size of the array
   but rather threads the array as a collection of bytes (octets), writing
   sequentially over it. Thus, if you use encodings such as UCS2 and UCS4, make
   sure that you choose the right endianness to match the shape of the array.

 - DELETE-FILE works on empty directories.

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