+* DESCRIBE now works on CONDITION objects.
+* The debugger now handles errors which arise when trying to print
+ *DEBUG-CONDITION*, so that it's less likely to fall into infinite
+ regress.
+* The build system now uses an additional file, customize-target-features.lisp,
+ to allow local modifications to the target *FEATURES* list. (The point of
+ this is that now I can set up a custom configuration, e.g. with :SB-SHOW
+ debugging features enabled, without having to worry about propagating it
+ into everyone's system when I do a "cvs update".) When no
+ customize-target-features.lisp file exists, the target *FEATURES* list
+ should be constructed the same way as before.
+* fixed bugs in DEFCONSTANT ANSI-compatibility:
+ ** DEFCONSTANT now tests reassignments using EQL, not EQUAL, in order to
+ warn about behavior which is undefined under the ANSI spec. Note: This
+ is specified by ANSI, but it's not very popular with programmers.
+ If it causes you problems, take a look at the new SB-INT:DEFCONSTANT-EQX
+ macro in the SBCL sources for an example of a workaround which you
+ might use to make portable ANSI-standard code which does what you want.
+ ** DEFCONSTANT's implementation is now based on EVAL-WHEN instead of on
+ pre-ANSI IR1 translation magic, so it does the ANSI-specified thing
+ when it's used as a non-toplevel form. (This is required in order
+ to implement the DEFCONSTANT-EQX macro.)
+ ** (DEFCONSTANT X 1) (DEFVAR X) (SETF X 2) no longer "works".
+ ** Unfortunately, non-toplevel DEFCONSTANT forms can still do some
+ funny things, due to bugs in the implementation of EVAL-WHEN
+ (bug #IR1-3). This probably won't be fixed until 0.7.x. (Fortunately,
+ non-toplevel DEFCONSTANTs are uncommon.)
+* The core file version number and fasl file version number have been
+ incremented, because the old noncompliant DEFCONSTANT behavior involved
+ calling functions which no longer exist, and because I also took the
+ opportunity to chop an unsupported slot out of the DEBUG-SOURCE structure.
+* fixed bug 1 (error handling before read-eval-print loop starts), and
+ redid debugger restarts and related debugger commands somewhat while
+ doing so:
+ ** The QUIT debugger command is gone, since it did something
+ rather different than the SB-EXT:QUIT command, and since it never
+ worked properly outside the main toplevel read/eval/print loop.
+ Invoking the new TOPLEVEL restart provides the same functionality.
+ ** The GO debugger command is also gone, since you can just invoke
+ the CONTINUE restart directly instead.
+ ** The TOP debugger command is also gone, since it's redundant with the
+ FRAME 0 command, and since it interfered with abbreviations for the
+ TOPLEVEL restart.
+* The system now recovers better from non-PACKAGE values of the *PACKAGE*
+ variable.
+* The system now understands compound CONS types (e.g. (CONS FIXNUM T))
+ as required by ANSI. (thanks to Douglas Crosher's CMU CL patches, with
+ some porting work by Martin Atzmueller)
+* Martin Atzmueller reviewed the CMU CL mailing lists and came back
+ with a boatload of patches which he ported to SBCL. Now that those
+ have been applied,
+ ** The system tries to make sure that its low-priority messages
+ are prefixed by semicolons, to help people who like to use
+ syntax highlighting in their ILISP buffer. (This patch
+ was originally due to Raymond Toy.)
+ ** The system now optimizes INTEGER-LENGTH better, thanks to more
+ patches originally written by Raymond Toy.
+ ** The compiler understands coercion between single-value and
+ multiple-VALUES type expressions better, getting rid of some very
+ weird behavior, thanks to patches originally by Robert MacLachlan
+ and Douglas Crosher.
+ ** The system understands ANSI-style non-KEYWORD &KEY arguments in
+ lambda lists, thanks to a patch originally by Pierre Mai.
+ ** The system no longer bogusly warns about "abbreviated type
+ declarations".
+ ** The compiler gets less confused by inlining and RETURN-FROM,
+ thanks to some patches originally by Tim Moore.
+ ** The system no longer hangs when dumping circular lists to fasl
+ files, thanks to a patch originally from Douglas Crosher.
+* Martin Atzmueller also fixed ROOM, so that it no longer fails with an
+ undefined function error.
+* gave up on fixing bug 3 (forbidden-by-ANSI warning for type mismatch
+ in structure slot initforms) for now, documented workaround instead:-|
+* fixed bug 4 (no WARNING for DECLAIM FTYPE of slot accessor function)
+* fixed bug 5: added stubs for various Gray stream functions called
+ in the not-a-CL:STREAM case, so that even when Gray streams aren't
+ installed, at least appropriate type errors are generated
+* fixed bug 8: better reporting of various PROGRAM-ERRORs
+* fixed bug 9: IGNORE and IGNORABLE now work reasonably and more
+ consistently in DEFMETHOD forms.
+* removed bug 21 from BUGS, since Martin Atzmueller points out that
+ it doesn't seem to affect SBCL after all
+* The C runtime system now builds with better optimization and many
+ fewer warnings, thanks to lots of cleanups by Martin Atzmueller.
+
+changes in sbcl-0.6.8 relative to sbcl-0.6.7:
+
+* The system is now under CVS at SourceForge (instead of the
+ CVS repository on my home machine).
+* The new signal handling code has been tweaked to treat register
+ contents as (UNSIGNED-BYTE 32), as the old CMU CL code did,
+ instead of (SIGNED-BYTE 32), as the C header files have it. (Code
+ downstream, e.g. in debug-int.lisp, has implicit dependencies
+ on the unsignedness of integer representation of machine words,
+ and that caused the system to bomb out with infinite regress
+ when trying to recover from type errors involving signed values,
+ e.g. (BUTLAST '(1 2 3) -1).)
+* (BUTLAST NIL) and (NBUTLAST NIL) now return NIL as they should.
+ (This was one of the bugs Peter Van Eynde reported back in July.)
+* The system now uses code inspired by Colin Walters' O(N)
+ implementation of MAP (from the cmucl-imp@cons.org mailing
+ list, 2 September 2000) when it can't use a DEFTRANSFORM to
+ inline the MAP operation, and there is more than one
+ sequence argument to the MAP call (so that it can't just
+ do ETYPECASE once and for all based on the type of the
+ single sequence argument). (The old non-inline implementation
+ of the general M-argument sequence-of-length-N case required
+ O(M*N*N) time when any of the sequence arguments were LISTs.)
+* The QUIT :UNIX-CODE keyword argument has been renamed to
+ QUIT :UNIX-STATUS. (The old name still works, but is deprecated.)
+* Raymond Wiker's patches to port RUN-PROGRAM from CMU CL to SBCL
+ have been added.
+* Raymond Wiker's patches to port dynamic loading from Linux to
+ FreeBSD have been added.
+* The BUGS file is now more nearly up to date, thanks in large part
+ to Martin Atzmueller's review of it.
+* The debugger now flushes standard output streams before it begins
+ its output ("debugger invoked" and so forth).
+* The core version number and fasl file version number have both
+ been incremented, because of incompatible changes in the layout
+ of static symbols.
+* FINISH-OUTPUT is now called more consistently on QUIT. (It
+ used to not be called for a saved Lisp image.)
+* Martin Atzmueller's version of a patch to fix a compiler crash,
+ as posted on sbcl-devel 13 September 2000, has been installed.
+* Instead of installing Martin Atzmueller's patch for the
+ compiler transform for SUBSEQ, I deleted the compiler transform,
+ and transforms for some similar consing operations.
+* A bug in signal handling which kept TRACE from working on OpenBSD
+ has been fixed.
+* added enough DEFTRANSFORMs to allow (SXHASH 'FOO) to be optimized
+ away by constant folding
+* The system now defines its address space constants in one place
+ (in the Lisp sources), and propagates them automatically elsewhere
+ (through GENESIS and the sbcl.h file). Therefore, patching the
+ address map is less unnecessarily tedious and error-prone. The
+ Lisp names of address space constants have also been systematized.
+* CVS tags like dollar-Header-dollar have been removed from
+ the sources, because they have never saved me trouble and
+ they've been source of trouble working with patches and other
+ diff-related operations.
+* fixed the PROG1-vs.-PROGN bug in HANDLER-BIND (reported by
+ ole.rohne@cern.ch on cmucl-help@cons.org 2000-10-25)
+
+changes in sbcl-0.6.7 relative to sbcl-0.6.6:
+
+* The system has been ported to OpenBSD.
+* The system now compiles with a simple "sh make.sh" on the systems
+ that it's supported on. I.e., now you no longer need to tweak
+ text in the target-features.lisp-expr and symlinks in src/runtime/
+ by hand, the make.sh takes care of it for you.
+* The system is no longer so grossly inefficient when compiling code
+ involving vectors implemented as general (not simple) vectors (VECTOR T),
+ so code which dares to use VECTOR-PUSH-EXTEND and FILL-POINTER, or
+ which dares to use the various sequence functions on non-simple
+ vectors, takes less of a performance hit.
+ * There is now a primitive type predicate VECTOR-T-P
+ to test for the (VECTOR T) type, so that e.g.
+ (DEFUN FOO (V) (DECLARE (TYPE (VECTOR T) V)) (AREF V 3))
+ can now be compiled with some semblance of efficiency. (The old code
+ turned the type declaration into a full call to %TYPEP at runtime!)
+ * AREF on (VECTOR T) is still not fast, since it's still compiled
+ as a full call to SB-KERNEL:DATA-VECTOR-REF, but at least the
+ ETYPECASE used in DATA-VECTOR-REF is now compiled reasonably
+ efficiently. (The old version made full calls to SUBTYPEP at runtime!)
+ * (MAKE-ARRAY 12 :FILL-POINTER T) is now executed less inefficiently,
+ without making full calls to SUBTYPEP at runtime.
+ (Some analogous efficiency issues for non-simple vectors specialized to
+ element types other than T, or for non-simple multidimensional arrays,
+ have not been addressed. They could almost certainly be handled the
+ same way if anyone is motivated to do so.)
+* The changes in array handling break binary compatibility, so
+ *BACKEND-FASL-FILE-VERSION* has been bumped to 4.
+* (TYPEP (MAKE-ARRAY 12 :FILL-POINTER 4) 'VECTOR) now returns (VALUES T)
+ instead of (VALUES T T).
+* By following the instructions that Dan Barlow posted to sbcl-devel
+ on 2 July 2000, I was able to enable primitive dynamic object
+ file loading code for Linux. The full-blown CMU CL LOAD-FOREIGN
+ functionality is not implemented (since it calls ld to resolve
+ library references automatically, requiring RUN-PROGRAM for its
+ implementation), but a simpler SB-EXT:LOAD-1-FOREIGN (which doesn't
+ try to resolve library references) is now supported.
+* The system now flushes the standard output streams when it terminates,
+ unless QUIT is used with the RECKLESSLY-P option set. It also flushes
+ them at several other probably-convenient times, e.g. in each pass of
+ the toplevel read-eval-print loop, and after evaluating a form given
+ as an "--eval" command-line option. (These changes were motivated by a
+ discussion of stream flushing issues on cmucl-imp in August 2000.)
+* The source transform for TYPEP of array types no longer assumes
+ that an array whose element type is a not-yet-defined type
+ is implemented as an array of T, but instead punts, so that the
+ type will be interpreted at runtime.
+* There is now some support for cross-compiling in make.sh: each of
+ the phases of make.sh has its own script. (This should be transparent
+ to people doing ordinary, non-cross-compile builds.)
+* Since my laptop doesn't have hundreds of megabytes of memory like
+ my desktop machine, I became more motivated to do some items on
+ my to-do list in order to reduce the size of the system a little:
+ ** Arrange for various needed-only-at-cold-init things to be
+ uninterned after cold init. To support this, those things have
+ been renamed from FOO and *FOO* to !FOO and *!FOO* (i.e., all
+ symbols with such names are now uninterned after cold init).
+ ** Bind SB!C::*TOP-LEVEL-LAMBDA-MAX* to a nonzero value when building
+ fasl files for cold load.
+ ** Remove the old compiler structure pooling code (which used to
+ be conditional on the target feature :SB-ALLOC) completely.
+ ** Redo the representation of some data in cold init to be more compact.
+ (I also looked into supporting byte compiled code at bootstrap time,
+ which would probably reduce the size of the system a lot, but that
+ looked too complicated, so I punted for now.)
+* The maximum signal nesting depth in the src/runtime/ support code has
+ been reduced from 4096 to 256. (I don't know any reason for the very
+ large old value. If the new smaller value turns out to break something,
+ I'll probably just bump it back up.)
+* PPRINT-LOGICAL-BLOCK is now pickier about the types of its arguments,
+ as per ANSI.
+* Many, many bugs reported by Peter Van Eynde have been added to
+ the BUGS list; some have even been fixed.
+* While enabling dynamic object file loading, I tried to make the
+ code easier to understand, renaming various functions and variables
+ with less ambiguous names, and changing some function calling
+ conventions to be Lispier (e.g. returning NIL instead of 0 for failure).
+* While trying to figure out how to do the OpenBSD port, I tried to
+ clean up some of the code in src/runtime/. In particular, I dropped
+ support for non-POSIX signal handling, added various comments,
+ tweaked the code to reduce the number of compilation warnings, and
+ renamed some files to increase consistency.
+* To support the new automatic configuration functionality in make.sh,
+ the source file target-features.lisp-expr has been replaced with the
+ source file base-target-features.lisp-expr and the machine-generated
+ file local-target-features.lisp-expr.
+* fixed a stupid quoting error in make.sh so that using CMU CL
+ "lisp -batch" as cross-compilation host works again