newLISP® v.10.2.8 Release Notes rev 2010-05-20

Version 10.2.8 is a stable maintenance version of the 10.2 series of releases. It introduces a new net-packet functions, other minor API enhancements in network and other functions and fixes bugs.

If upgrading from versions previous to 10.2, pease read the 10.2 Release notes

Additions and improvements to networking functionality

• A new net-packet function can be used to inject custom configured IP packets. The function is only available on UNIX like operating systems and has been configued and tested for Mac OS X on PPC and Intel CPUs, UBUNTU Linux on Intel CPUs and OpenBSD on Intel CPUs.
• The net-connect function now has a timeout parameter. In older versions connection timeout behavior was controlled by the OS. Now connection timeout is under programmer control.
• The timeout parameter in the web functions get-url, post-url, put-url and delete-url now also controls the connection phase. In older versions, it only controlled the processs after connecting. This gave web functions the appearance of hanging when the target server was disconnected or down. Now these functions already can timout during the connection phase.
• The net-service function now works in both directions. Now port number can be translated to service names too. In older versions only translation from service names to port numbers was possible.

Other changes and additions

• The timing function time did overflow after 35 minutes in the 10.x generation of newLISP; now it can count to about 68 years.
• Speedup of hash entry deleletion. No reference checks are made anymore when deleting hash entries using ( nil).
• find-all has improved behavior on looping conditions, where it no will increment the search offset by 1. Looping conditions occur, when regular expressions result in zero-length strings found. In previous versions find-all did exit on looping conditions.
• In MS Windows both URLs forms: file://C:/example.txt and file:///C:/example.txt are now valid.
• The save function has been made faster up to a factor of 10x.
• OpenBSD 4.6 now added as a regular test environment additionally to Mac OSX, FreeBSD, UBUNTU Linux, SunOs Sparc and Windows XP/7.

Bug fixes

• The map function now handles short parameter lists in a consistent manner when mapping string manipulating functions onto lists of strings.
• xml-parse with context option did not convert tag names equal to the names of built-in primitives.
• load in HTTP mode did not return to previous context, but always went into MAIN.
• On Win32 negative -Inf lost the sign when converting to the maximum integer value.
• The true flag in delete was not handled correctly since 10.2.0.
• In get-url the "list-debug" option did return a string instead of a list.
• The find function accepted the regex option number only as a constant.