========================== C M U C L  20 c =============================

[--- WORK IN PROGRESS ---]

The CMUCL project is pleased to announce the release of CMUCL 20c.
This is a major release which contains numerous enhancements and
bug fixes from the 20b release.

CMUCL is a free, high performance implementation of the Common Lisp
programming language which runs on most major Unix platforms. It
mainly conforms to the ANSI Common Lisp standard. CMUCL provides a
sophisticated native code compiler; a powerful foreign function
interface; an implementation of CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System,
which includes multi-methods and a meta-object protocol; a source-level
debugger and code profiler; and an Emacs-like editor implemented in
Common Lisp. CMUCL is maintained by a team of volunteers collaborating
over the Internet, and is mostly in the public domain.

New in this release:

  * Known issues:

  * Feature enhancements
    - Update to Unicode 5.2.0.
    - Add support for character name completion.  This can be used by
      Slime to do character name completion.
    - Initial support for Solaris/x86.  CMUCL will run on Solaris/x86
      with all features available, except only Unicode is supported.

  * Changes
    - ASDF2 updated to version 2.010.
    - COMPILE-FILE now accepts a :DECODING-ERROR argument that
      indicates how to handle decoding errors when reading the file.
      It has the same meaning and effect as the :DECODING-ERROR
      argument to OPEN.  This defaults to T here so that decoding
      errors are signaled on invalid sequences instead of silently
      replacing the bad sequence with some kind of replacement
      character.
    - In 19f through 20b, READ-SEQUENCE could read mostly arbitrary
      data from a stream in to the given sequence.  In this release,
      READ-SEQUENCE cannot do that unless the stream is a
      binary-text-stream.   This is an incompatible change from
      previous releases.
    - RUN-PROGRAM accepts :EXTERNAL-FORMAT parameter to specify the
      external format to be used for any streams that RUN-PROGRAM
      needs to create.
    - Add src/tools/build-all.sh to automate building all of the
      variants (x87/sse2, unicode/8-bit).
    - LISP::ENUMERATE-MATCHES had a keyword arg named
      :VERIFY-EXISTANCE.  This has been changed to :VERIFY-EXISTENCE. 

  * ANSI compliance fixes:
    - Fixes for signaling errors with READ-CHAR and READ-BYTE
      o READ-CHAR signals errors if the stream is not a character
        stream.  This is a change from 20a and 20b, but matches
        releases before 19f.  (Almost.  19f allowed reading characters
        from (unsigned-byte 8) streams.  19e did not.)
      o READ-BYTE signals errors if the stream is not a binary
        stream.  This is also a change from 20a and 20b, but matches
        releases before 19f.  (Almost.  19f allowed reading bytes from
        character streams.  19e did not.) 
      o But READ-CHAR and READ-BYTE will work if the stream class is
        'binary-text-stream, an extension for bivalent streams in
        CMUCL.  READ-CHAR will use the specified external format for
        such streams.  READ-BYTE reads (unsigned-byte 8) elements from
        such streams.
    - UNINTERN no longer removes the wrong symbol.  UNINTERN would
      remove the symbol when inherited from another package although
      it should not.
    - DEFSTRUCT allows multiple keyword constructors as required by
      the spec..
    - In COMPILE-FILE, the :OUTPUT-FILE can also be a stream.
    - (OPEN f :DIRECTION :IO :IF-DOES-NOT-EXIST NIL) no longer signals
      an error if f does not exist.  It returns NIL now.

  * Bugfixes:
    - The pairwise composition table is now correctly built.
      Previously, it skipped over non-BMP codepoints.  This also
      requires a fix in %COMPOSE to handle non-BMP codepoints
      correctly.  The normalization test now passes.
    - On x86, REALPART and IMAGPART no longer incorrectly returns 0
      instead of the correct part of a complex number in some
      situations.
    - The command line parser now correctly handles the case where
      "--" is the first command option.
    - build.sh was accidenally loading the site-init file, but it
      shouldn't. 
    - On sparc, the vops to add a float to a complex were broken,
      resulting in a complex number with the float as realpart and
      garbage for the imaginary part.  This is now fixed.
    - XLIB::GET-BEST-AUTHORIZATION will now return authorization data
      if the protocol is :local, if the xauth file contains just
      "localhost/unix:0".  Previously, no authorization data was
      returned because GET-BEST-AUTHORIZATION was looking for the
      hostname.
    - FORMAT signals an warning if ~:; is used inside ~:[.
    - SET-SYSTEM-EXTERNAL-FORMAT was not actually setting the filename
      encoding if given.
    - SUBSEQ with an end index less than the start index sometimes
      crashes CMUCL. Now, signal an error if the boudns are not
      valid. 
    - Localization support was causing many calls to stat trying to
      find non-existent translation files.  This has been fixed so
      that the results are cached.  (If new translations are added,
      the cache will need to be cleared or cmucl restarted.)  This
      change cuts building time by half on Solaris/sparc.
    - On NetBSD, function-end breakpoints, especially for
      tail-recursive functions, are working now.
    - On NetBSD, display of FP numbers (sse2 and x87) during tracing
      has been corrected.  Previously, random values were displayed.
    - Executables images can now be created on NetBSD again.
    - EXT::DESCRIBE-EXTERNAL-FORMAT was not exported.
    - TRACE was erroneously allowing encapsulation when tracing local
      flet/labels functions.  This doesn't actually trace anything.
      An error is now signaled in this case.  This usually happens
      because the function is in one of CMUCL's internal
      implementation packages.  If you know what you're doing, you can
      use the trace option :encapsulate nil to trace them.  Tracing
      functions used by TRACE can cause bad things.
    - In some situations the compiler could not constant fold SQRT
      calls because KERNEL:%SQRT was not defined on x86 with SSE2.
      Fix this.

  * Trac Tickets:

  * Other changes:

  * Improvements to the PCL implementation of CLOS:

  * Changes to building procedure:

This release is not binary compatible with code compiled using CMUCL
20b; you will need to recompile FASL files. 

See <URL:http://www.cons.org/cmucl/> for download information,
guidelines on reporting bugs, and mailing list details.


We hope you enjoy using this release of CMUCL!