newLISP® v.10.2.1 Release Notes rev 2010-03-17

This release introduces mutable objects in the FOOP object system and some additions and changes to the API.

Note that the name change from name to term and the introduction of the new functions ++, -- and extend can create incompatibilities when running new code under older 10.0 and 10.1 based versions of newLISP or when running older code under the new 10.2 version. For these cases, the release notes show code tips, to make code run on the new and older versions.

Version 10.1.8 to 10.1.12 are versions leading up to version 10.2.0

Version 10.2.1 fixes a severe bug in setf and swap introduced in v.10.1.12.

Many thanks to all in the newLISP community who have contributed to this release with advice, discussion and code.

Mutable objects in FOOP (Functional Object Oriented Programming)

Previous versions passed the FOOP object as first parameter to a FOOP function. From now on, the object is accessed via a self function:
```
(new Class 'Circle)

(context Circle)

(define (move dx dy)    ; object not passed as parameter
    (inc (self 1) dx)   ; but accessed via: self
    (inc (self 2) dy))  ; and mutable

(context MAIN)

(set 'myCircle (Circle 1 2 20))

(:move myCircle 3 4)

myCircle → (Circle 4 6 20)
```
The elimination of the object as the first passed parameter makes old FOOP code imcompatible with new versions. At the same time code to change objects is much easier to write in the new version, and execution speed is increased.

In old FOOP code only function definitions have to be changed by dropping the first parameter (the target oject) and renaming all occurrences of it in the function body to self. Function calls to FOOP functions need not to be changed.

Other changes and additions

New ++ and -- increment and decrement in integer mode.

To make new code using ++ work with older versions of newLISP, put the following statement at the beginning of the file:
```
    (when (< (sys-info -2) 10110)
        (constant (global '++) inc)
        (constant (global '-- ) dec))
```

The functions dec and inc now always work in floating point mode, regardless of the number of parameters. This could create problems with code interfacing to C library functions. In case integers have to be passed dec and inc should be converted to ++ and --.

The function crit-chi2 took (1.0 - alpha) probabilities to calculate the critical Chi2. Now alpha should be passed as probability parameter.

A nil parameter in the delete functions enables much faster namespace deletion without reference checking. This mode should only be used when no references external to the namespace exist to symbols inside that namespace. This is normally true for hash namespaces and object systems which strictly limit direct access to namespace variables. Deleting symbols or namespaces whose symbols are referenced externally will crash the system.

define-macro's (fexpr's) are now included in error reporting. Before they would be reported as part of a define function which called it.

In det and invert a new optional parameter controls how zero pivot elements are handled in the LU decomposition algorithm . When the optional Boolean parameter is not specified, the functions return nil on singular matrices. The optional parameter specifies 0.0 (zero) or a very small number to continue calculation, as required for some algorithms dealing with singular matrices.

An additional and optional list-index in now can pick an element of the result list.

A new extend function allows destructive appends to lists or strings. Usage of write or write-bufer and write-line for string extension is discouraged. To make newer code using extend run on older version of newLISP, insert the following statement at the beginning of the program file:
```
    ; make new code working on older versions of newLISP
    (when (< (sys-info -2) 10110)
        (constant (global 'extend) write-buffer))
```

In the find function the regex option can now be specified as nil to do an offset-based search without regular expressions.

The name function has been deprecated; use term instead to extract the symbol name without the context prefix. The boolean flag option, which was present in name, is not present in term, use prefix to extract the prefix context from a symbol. The new term causes much less name clashes with user variables than name did. To make new code using term work with oder versions of newLISP, put the following statement at the beginning of the file:
```
    ; make new code working on older versions of newLISP
    (when (< (sys-info -2) 10111)
        (constant (global 'term) name)) 
```

A new prefix function returns the context of a symbol passed as parameter.

The pretty-print function can take an additional parameter to specify the default format string for printing floating point numbers. This is useful when printing unformatted floating point numbers without fractional parts, and these numbers should still be recognizabe as floating point numbers.

The deprecated use of $0 in ref, ref-all, set-ref and set-ref-all has been removed. In set-ref and set-ref-all, use only the anaphoric system variable $it to refer to the old contents. ref and ref-all can take a true option to return actual elements (formerly returned in $0) instead of index vectors. The usage of the system variables $0 through $9 is reserved for the case where regular expression matching is involved (with few exceptions).

read and write may be used as shorter writings of the elementary I/O functions read-buffer and write-buffer.

In starts-with and ends-with nil is not allowed anymore as option for case insensivity. Use the regex option 1 instead:

    ; instead of 
    (starts-with foo bar nil)
    ; do
    (starts-with foo bar 1)

This change will be compatible with previous versions of newLISP. But older code will throw an error exception if specifying nil instead of option 1 for case insensitivity.

The enviroment variable REQUEST_METHOD is now set by newLISP server mode to one of the strings GET, HEAD, PUT, POST, DELETE

Changes and additions in external files

Version 2.0 of GMP module file gmp.lsp fixes problems when using 64-bit newLISP.

The SMTP module file smtpx.lsp has been replaced with a new version 3.0 by Greg Slepak from http://taoeffect.com. The new version allows for a custom port and does UTF-8 safe encoding.

Cygwin is now supported again with makefile_cygwin and also recognized by the configure utility. The makefile_cygwin produces a newlisp.exe which can be placed into %NEWLISPDIR% together with cygwin1.dll from the Cygwin system. The environment variable NEWLISPDIR is set after after installing the Win32 version of newLISP and in most cases points to C:\Program files\newlisp or the equivalent in other language locales than English. The functions fork, spawn, sync, send and receive, which do not work in the normal Win32 version, work on Cygwin compiled newLISP, although slow.

Many thanks to Niek Albers from http://daansystems.com, for doing most of the work of making complilation work on Cygwin again.
The doc/INSTALL text file has an additional chapter for customized install and for package creators.

The editor syntax highlighting files in the util subdirectory of the source distribution have been updated:
```
    nanorc, newlisp.jsf, newlisp.vim
```

The following standard module files needed to be updated to run on both 10.1 and 10.2 versions of newLISP:
```
    canvas.lsp, ftp.lsp, gimp.lsp, postgres.lsp, sqlite3.lsp, stat.lsp, zlib.lsp
```

The following utilities shipped with the source distribution and published on http://newlisp.org have been updated to run on both 10.1 and 10.2 versions of newLISP:
```
    newlispdoc, syntax.cgi, upload.cgi, xmlrpc.cgi
```

Bug fixes

The Chi2 values calculated by crit-chi2 were too low for odd numbers of degrees of freedom – the bayes-query function was not affected by this.

FOOP objects were not protected if held by a protected symbol.

get-int did not do proper sign-extension in the 64-bit version of newLISP.

get-url now also handles error code 302 for re-location using the location: header. In the past only codes 301 and 303 were handled for automatic re-requesting with changed URI.

new had a memory leak in certain applications of this function.

The nil? predicate evaluated twice.

The probabilities calculated by prob-chi2 were too low for odd numbers of degrees of freedom.

push on -1 (end of list) optimization was broken when copying namespaces with new.

When using push on uninitialized symbols, the element pushed was returned instead of the new list created.

The select function now throws an error message when overrunning indexes.

self now honours symbol protection, if the object passed is held by a protected symbol.

A fix for string stream writing in 64-bit newLISP.

A messagebox pops up if a connection cannot be established between the newLISP process and the Java GUI server on Win32.

xml-parse now parses correctly UTF-8 characters.

∂