CMUCL News

News

2010-08 snapshot and 20b prerelease 1

CMUCL 20b prelease 1 has been released, in preparation for the upcoming 20b release. Therefore there will not be a 2010-08 snapshot.

Error handling has been added to external formats. Previously, all external formats would silently replace bad encodings with a suitable replacement character. Now, the user can specify how the errors are handled by using the :DECODING-ERROR and :ENCODING-ERROR parameters to OPEN. The default is the previous behavior.

For decoding-error, a character, symbol, or function can be given. If a character, then that character is used as the replacement character. For a symbol or function, it must be a function of 3 arguments: a message string, the offending octet (or nil), and the number of octets read in the encoding. If the function returns, it must be the codepoint of the desired replacement.

For encoding-error, a character, symbol, or function can be given. If a character, then that character is used as the replacement character. For a symbol or function, it must be a function of 2 arguments: a message string and the offending codepoint. If the function returns, it must be the codepoint of the desired replacement.
Add EXT:LIST-ALL-EXTERNAL-FORMATS to list all known external formats and their aliases.
ADD EXT:DESCRIBE-EXTERNAL-FORMAT to print a description of the specified exernal format. To support this, the macros DEFINE-EXTERNAL-FORMAT and DEFINE-COMPOSING-EXTERNAL-FORMAT have changed.
The sparc port now supports the :executable feature.
The Mac OS X port now support the :executable feature.
A critical bug in the fast unicode stream buffering routine has been fixed. This bug manifests itself by causing valid sequences to be incorrectly decoded, resulting in a replacement character.
UTF-8 correctly catches overlong sequences now. Previously, overlong sequences were missed.
When UTF-8 decoder encounters an overlong sequence, a surrogate code point, or a too-large codepoint, the entire sequence is converted to the replacement character. Previously, all of the octets except the first were put back, and the data read again.
Some GC improvements for sparc and ppc. (Changes for ppc untested). GC could incorrectly move the PC and other registers, causing a segfault.
A bug inadvertently introduced in the 2010-04 non-unicode snapshot has been fixed. The bug prevented the non-unicode versions of CMUCL from loading the external format aliases file.
With SSE2, the imaginary part of a (complex single-float) is now returned correctly.
The method used to create executable images for Linux has been cleaned up and should be far more robust against different versions of the OS. The same is true on sparc as well as Mac OS X.

2010-07 snapshot

DELETE-FILE, ENSURE-DIRECTORIES-EXIST, FILE-AUTHOR, FILE-WRITE-DATE, and OPEN now merge the given pathname with *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS* as required by CLHS sec 19.2.3.
When printing out argument values in the debugger and also during TRACE, the incorrect values were returned for the SSE2 core. This was caused by using the x87 values instead of the sse2 values in the sigcontext. This is fixed now.

2010-06 snapshot

ASDF2 and MK-DEFSYS have been added as contrib modules. Use (require :asdf) or (require :defsystem) to load these.
A new switch, -help has been added. This prints out a brief summary of the available command line switches and exists. You may also use --help.
The GCD of positive integers sometimes returned a negative result. This is fixed.

2010-05 snapshot

Source information (file) for defstructs and deftypes is now provided. DESCRIBE will print out the name of the file where the defstruct/deftype was defined.
WITH-STANDARD-IO-SYNTAX uses the standard pprint dispatch table now instead of the current table.
PRINC-TO-STRING binds *PRINT-READABLY* to NIL as required. Previously, it used the current value of *PRINT-READABLY*.
DEFCLASS signals an error if the class name already names a DECLARATION.
The :METHOD-CLASS argument to ENSURE-GENERIC-FUNCTION can be a class object as well as a name.
Recognize but ignore the :DECLARE argument to ENSURE-GENERIC-FUNCTION.
Default documentation for short form of DEFINE-METHOD-COMBINATION is NIL, not "".
MAC is an alias for the CR composing external format.
Trac #39: non-standard-lexical syntax is fixed. The reader macros are no longer installed by default. Use (intl:install) to install them.

2010-04 snapshot

Support for internalization/localization added. Messages from CMUCL can be translated, but currently only a few messages in Korean are translated. For fun, there is a full Pig Latin translation (done by machine).
COMPILE will update the macro-function if the specified names a macro. (Previously, the fdefinition of the name was set.)
CMUCL now signals a cerror when attempting to redefine a slot accessor via DEFUN or COMPILE. If continued, the accessor is redefined, and CMUCL assumes the new definition is usable as a slot accessor. Previously, CMUCL would print a warning and undefine the structure.
An issue with SSE2 and GC hooks has been fixed. This shows up when doing arithmetic with GC hooks that use the SSE registers. The SSE state is saved along with the x87 state.

2010-03 snapshot

FROUND is much faster for single and double float numbers. This is available everywhere, except for x87 (due to potential roundoff errors.)
CMUCL no longer segfaults on Linux when running on a kernel without COMPAT_BRK. CMUCL will set the personality appropriately and re-exec itself.
GET-MACRO-CHARACTER would return the wrong second value because *READTABLE* was always being used instead of the specified readtable.
COMPILE-FILE was generating an error when compiling COMPILE forms. This is fixed.
A critical bug in SSE2 support has been fixed. Multiplying a complex single-float by a single-float produced the wrong result.
Fix issue where CMUCL does not correctly handle FLETs in DEFMETHOD bodies which use the same name as that of the generic function. The generic function was called instead of the local function.
CMUCL would fail to compile external formats if *READTABLE* was not the standard readtable. This is fixed by binding *READTABLE* to the standard readtable before compiling the external format.
The debugger help messages is updated to reflect the actual implementation. In particular L and PP have been updated, and help for the DESCRIBE command has been added

2010-02

Some issues with FILE-POSITION on unicode builds have been fixed. However, FILE-POSITION is still incorrect for files using external formats that have a byte-order mark.
The error-output and trace-file files are now opened using the same external format as specified in COMPILE-FILE. This ensures that these output files can correctly represent the same characters as used for the input file.
The debugger now opens files using the same external format as used to compile them. Previously, the default format was used, which would be wrong if the file is in a different format. This resulted in the debugger being unable to find the source forms.
TRANSLATE-PATHNAMES now creates the resulting path to be an absolute or relative path according to whether the TO pathname is abslute or relative. Previously, the result was take from the SOURCE pathname, except if TO were absolute, in which case the result was absolute.

2010-01-04

Experimental support for static arrays has been added. These are allocated in foreign (malloc) space and are never moved by GC. They are, however, properly garbage collected. To create an array, use MAKE-ARRAY with :ALLOCATION :MALLOC. Only arrays of character; 8, 16, and 32-bit integers (signed or unsigned); single and double floats; and complex single and double floats are supported.

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