newLISPtm v.8.6.0 Release Notes rev-3 June 10th, 2005

Highlights

This release adds user defined signal handlers (UNIX flavors only) and timers (all platforms). Many issues on the Mac OSX platform have been resolved, which is now a fully supported platform besides Linux, BSDs and Win32. A binary package installer for the Mac OSX platform is now part of all full and development releases. The Mac OSX flavor is now supported for making UTF-8 and shared library versions. The TclTk frontend needs TclTk-Aqua installed on Mac OSX.

Many thanks to the software engineers at Kozoru , who prompted most of the changes and additions in this release.

Large performance  improvement in string replacement with replace. The SQLite3 module file now supports FLOATs and BLOBs as data types. A new tcltk.lsp example file shows how to create TclTk GUIs in newlisp without the need of the newLISP-tk graphical frontend. Many small improvements in several functions. Several bugs where resolved in the networking, UTF-8 and regular expression functional areas. CYGWIN support was dropped, but makefile_cygwin stays in the source distribution. A Tru64 flavor for the HP/Compaq Alpha CPU was added, maintained at http://gtk-server.org.

new or changed functionality	description	version
factor	new function factor for factoring numbers into primes	8.5.1
timer	new function oneshot timer with ms resolution and user defined timer handlers	8.5.1
signal	new user defined signal handlers	8.5.1
debug	new debug option in the SIGINT / Ctrl-C menu. This is only available on UNIX versions and not functional on all.	8.5.2
sqlite3.lsp	now handles FLOATs and BLOBs	8.5.5
net-connect	new "broadcast" option in net-connect, was previously only available on blocking UDP	8.5.6
replace	big speed-up on bigger (> 100k) files	8.5.7
output to STD I/O	output to STD I/O when not going to a terminal, now is flushed after each write. This permits UNIX inetd handlers written in newLISP.	8.5.8
share	memory shares now support nil and true as data addtional to numbers and strings	8.5.8
read-buffer	now can take an optional wait-string similar to net-receive	8.5.9
Mac OSX	makefile_osx for compiling without readline support and makefile_darwin for compiling with readline support, makefile_osx_lib for share library newlisp.so and make files for UTF-8 support, make_osx_package for making a Mac OSX installer package	8.5.1-10
crc32	new function for calculating 32bit Circular Redundancy Check	8.6.0
bug fixes
newLISP-tk	fixed load last file functionality on Mac OSX in the newLISP-tk frontend	8.5.1
main-args	now initialized to the empty '() list instead of nil in the library versions	8.5.1
dolist	now safe again for changing the iteration list inside the loop and safe for escaping with throw (back to 8.3.2 behaviour, uses more memory but safer overall)	8.5.1
args	args was not reset to '() when left unused in recursion levels	8.5.3
newlisp-tk.tcl	several UTF-8 issues where fixed for hostnames and filenames and parsing of numbers	8.5.5
net-connect	had a problem on big-endian CPUs when using the multicast option	8.5.6
[cmd], [/cmd]	fixed segfault when hitting control characters while in between [cmd] tags	8.5.10
regular expresssions	replace would replace only once when regex patterns where found of 0 (zero) length as in ^, $ and \b boundary patterns.	8.5.10
implicit indexing	would not accept subsequent constant indices when the first index was a variable	8.5.10
share	had a memory leak on Win32	8.6.0
unpack	on OpenBSD sometimes would not completely unpack  data structures	8.5.11

The versions newLISP 8.5.1 to newLISP 8.5.11 where released as development versions.