HELP NEWS.V12 A.Sloman Oct 1986
For most recent news, see HELP * NEWS
April 1986 POPLOG VERSION 12
There are many new features described in the following news items,
and in HELP * LISPNEWS and HELP * PLOGNEWS, including RATIOS,
COMPLEX NUMBERS, a POPLOG WINDOW MANAGER, a much improved and almost
complete COMMON LISP, various new library programs including LIB
FLAVOURS (see TEACH * FLAVOURS), a large collection of bug fixes,
rationalisation of the libraries, and a substantial performance
improvement for PROLOG (up to 4.5 klips for 'naive reverse' on a
Systime 8750).
The POP-11 language has been substantially extended (partly by
adding facilities required for common lisp), including full lexical
scoping and non-local goto. See REF * NUMBERS and REF * VMCODE
especially.
There will shortly be a POPLOG USERGUIDE and a VED USERGUIDE
available as manuals, and a VED PROGRAMMER'S guide is in
preparation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
May 1 (Aaron Sloman)
VEDRANGEREPEATER sometimes produced spurious characters at end of
'current' line. Fixed by calling vedtrimline.
See HELP *VEDPROCS /vedrangerepeater
Apr 30 (Aaron Sloman)
--- fixed lib regions (it previously used 'lambda ... end' instead of
'procedure ... endprocedure)
--- ved_diff used not to call vedsetlinesize or vedtrimline where it
should have. Now fixed. (See HELP * DIFF)
--- HELP * VEDCOMMS updated (ved_what and ved_diff)
--- Other HELP files updated: *VARS*ARRAYS*NEWARRAY*NEWANYARRAY
Apr 23 (John Willliams)
--- VED_SMR (sort marked range) generalised: if argument is '-f' it
"folds" uppercase into lower case. See HELP *VEDCOMMS/ved_smr
Apr 22 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- CANCEL will no longer cancel protected words. See HELP * CANCEL.
Apr 22 (John Gibson)
--- A major bug has been found in some of the procedures concerned
with device output. Under some circumstances, a call of -syswrite-
on a device would have caused the corruption of the structure
immediately following the device in memory. This bug (which has been
in all versions of Poplog since its earliest days) was almost
certainly responsible for many of the unrepeatable crashes that
happened from time to time in the past (crashes inside the garbage
collector in particular). Needless to say, the bug is now fixed.
Apr 20 (John Williams and Aaron Sloman)
--- The old LISP system is being withdrawn. See HELP * LISP
The old HELP LISP is now $usepop/pop/lsp/lisp.
The directory $usepop/pop/lsp/* (UNIX) or USEPOP:[POP.LSP...] (VMS)
will be removed from POPLOG Version 13.
Apr 20 (Aaron Sloman)
HELP * VED_WHAT describes an experimental enhanced mechanism
for finding out about POP-11 or VED system procedures or variables.
Apr 15 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- LIB INSTANCE altered so that the undefaction procedure (if
provided) will be called if the value of a "?" variable is an undef
object. Previously it was only called if the identprops were undef.
See HELP * INSTANCE.
Apr 14 (Sak Wathanasin)
--- HELP * PLOGNEWS updated
Apr 13 (Aaron Sloman)
--- HELP *INITIAL for VMS and UNIX updated and merged. (POPLOG
initialisation overview files).
NB: the comment on 'init.pl' files was wrong previously.
--- New HELP files for LIB * VED_IMCSH (running C-shell from a
VED window). See HELP *IMCSH*CSH_COMPILE*KILLCSH
--- Environment variable $POPCOMPPATH extended to include
$POPLIBLIB: (For running POP-11 with a parameter to invoke a file).
--- LIB * VED_SOURCFILE: bug fixed and speeded up. Now finds exact
match first. (See HELP *POPINDEX)
Apr 11 (Aaron Sloman)
--- DOC *SYSSPEC thoroughly updated
--- REF *FASTPROCS brought up to date
--- HELP files updated:
*BEGINNERS *BITWISE *CONTENTS *HELPFILES*POPLOG*POPPROCS*SYSWORDS*UNDO*VEDCOMMS
--- The default help file is now *BEGINNERS. *INDEX is now
just a list of files. HELP *HELPINDEX is withdrawn.
--- VED <ENTER> g can be used to examine help or teach files with
section headers and table of contents in the form described in
HELP * ENTER_G. See LIB * VED_G. Some related utilities:
VED_HEADING can format POPLOG-style headers in a file,
VED_INDEXIFY builds a table of contents for VED_G.
(Use to create a 'temporary menu' for a long file.)
Apr 6 (Ben Rubinstein)
--- There is now a preliminary release of the
POPLOG WINDOW MANAGER
See HELP files: * PWM * PWMWINDOWS * PWMGRAPHICS
Apr 6 (Aaron Sloman)
--- HELP * POPVARS updated and reformatted. HELP * STRINGS extended.
Mar 25 (John Williams)
--- LIB *POPHOST now has two new fields, "machinetype", and
"fullsitename". Also, the field "osversion" is now computed from the
tail of the list SYS_OS_TYPE, and may differ slightly from what it
used to be in some versions of POPLOG.
Mar 22 (Aaron Sloman)
--- ISENDSTRING takes two words or strings and tests whether the
first is a final substring of the second. See HELP * ISENDSTRING.
Mar 17 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- (UNIX only). *SYSGETPASSWDENTRY will return a vector of
information got from the 'passwd' file.
NOTE (SUNS only). On Suns using the network 'yellow pages' passwd
databases the network entry will be retrieved, but modifications to
the passwd entry specified in the local 'passwd' file will not be
shown. See MAN PASSWD(5).
Mar 16 (John Gibson)
--- The VED commands copy, d, mi, mo, ti, to etc, as well as the
line deleting function now replace interactive-mode prompt marker
characters with spaces (thus producing normal editable lines).
--- (Unix Only) All files opened by Poplog now have the Unix
'close-on-execute' flag set automatically. This means that on a
-sysexecute- all files will be closed, except that -sysexecute-
unsets the flag for the three standard devices -popdevin-,
-popdevout- and -popdeverr-. You can also supply a (non-empty) list
of devices to be left open as an optional 4th argument to
-sysexecute-.
Mar 6 (Ben Rubinstein)
--- VEDSUN, VEDWINSUN, and associated files and procedures
reorganised. VEDSUN and VEDWINSUN are now in popvedlib; all other
files are in $usepop/pop/lib/sun ("popsunlib"). LIB * POPSUNLIB
added, which ensures that popsunlib is in the users popliblist. See
HELP * VEDSUN, *VEDWINSUN. Previous version of VEDSUN is now
LIB * OLDVEDSUN, with HELP * OLDVEDSUN
Mar 6 (John Williams)
--- Some minor bug fixes:
IDENTTYPE now returns 0 for an untyped identifier, not "full".
SYSPROTECT no longer mishaps if applied to a system identifier.
SYSSYNONYM now checks that its first argument is an identifier.
Also, synonyms are now 'local' to the current section.
--- Most procedures that deal with identifiers (at either compile or
run time) will now accept lisp symbols as well.
Mar 6 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- LIBRARIES. One of the changes introduced to POPLOG since Version
11 is that some considerable work has gone into sorting out the
libraries. As a result some (although I am sure not all) files that
are only relevant to the Sussex site or Sussex teaching have been
removed from the publicly distributed libraries and many of the
files that are only relevant to particular operating systems or
configurations will only appear on those versions.
All libraries should now have a standard (commented) header
containing information about the file. The slot marked "file" will
usually have a unix-type path specification beginning
$usepop/master/C.???/... The part following 'C.' gives us an
indication of which machines the file is relevant to. For most this
will be C.all but some may for example be C.unix or C.vms. The rest
of the path should specify where the file lives relative to
'$usepop/pop'. So for example the file which bears the path
'$usepop/master/C.all/lib/auto/record.p' should be the file
'$usepop/pop/lib/auto/record.p' on your system.
--- POP-2. Another change for POP-11 is a break from its ancestor
POP-2. Previously effort was made for POP-11 to be compatible and
many autoloadable libraries provided synonyms for POP-2 names. These
have all been removed from the autoloadable library and replaced
with the single compatibility library LIB * POP2. For details see
HELP * POP2. If you are in the habit of using POP-2 procedures or
names then you should load this in your 'init.p' file (see HELP *
INITIAL).
--- NEW LIBRARIES include an object-oriented programming environment
loosely based on Zetalisp flavors (see TEACH * FLAVOUR for details).
There is a new ved configuration for bbc computers with a vt100
emulation (see HELP * BBCVT100). LIB * CONTEXT by Allan Ramsay
allows the saving of the state of chosen variables within set
contexts. See HELP * CONTEXT.
Mar 4 (John Gibson)
--- Version 11.2. The Poplog virtual machine and the POP-11 compiler
now support lexically-scoped non-local jumps. That is, a -goto- (or
-go_on-) statement in a POP-11 procedure can reference a label which
is anywhere within that procedure or a lexically enclosing one, e.g.
define ismember(item, list);
applist(list, procedure(x);
if x = item then goto found endif
endprocedure);
return(false);
found:
return(true)
enddefine;
Similarily, all jump-type virtual machine instructions (GOTO, IFSO,
IFNOT, AND, OR, GO_ON) can take labels that are anywhere in the nest
of procedures for which code is being planted (including the current
batch of execute-level code). See REF *VMCODE, and in particular the
section 'Implementation of Non-Local Jumps' for a discussion of
efficiency issues.
Feb 20 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- LIB PROFILE will now accept input from the same line as the
command when run from LMR in VED. It will also print results in
floating point format instead of as ratios. See HELP * PROFILE.
Feb 19 (Aaron Sloman)
--- VED fixed so that it will cope with situation where a file has
been edited in the current directory, then directory changed, and
VED invoked with a full path-name for the file, or the reverse
situation. This involved changing VEDPRESENT (see HELP *
VEDPROCS/vedpresent) to detect such situations.
Feb 13 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- VED_SS and VED_WW which allow caseless searching in ved, moved
from local library to public. See HELP * VED_SS, *VED_WW, and also
HELP * VEDPROCS/vedtestclsearch, *VEDPROCS/vedcllocate.
Feb 11 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- New procedure *EXPANDLIST will expand a dynamic list and turn it
into a static list.
--- SYSSORT, COPYTREE, NCREV, NCDELETE and FLATTEN all now work
properly with dynamic lists. FAST_NCREV, FAST_NCDELETE and
FAST_FLATTEN will not.
Feb 4 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- SYSTMPFILE fixed to use SYS_>< and so prevent funny names if
POP_PR_QUOTES is true.
Jan 31 (John Williams)
--- Aled Morris' Cifer terminal conversion, LIB *VEDCIFER, is now
available. This downloads code into the Cifer to make it support VED
in a much improved fashion. See HELP *VEDCIFER, CIFERKEYS for more
details.
Jan 27 (Aaron Sloman)
--- New directory $popdatalib = $usepop/pop/lib/data now contains
data for library programs, e.g. edgepic, grammar1. Some of these
used to be in other directories.
--- POPUSESLIST altered to include $popdatalib.
Jan 26 (Aaron Sloman)
--- VED_LMR, <ENTER> L and <ENTER> L1 changed so that warning
messages inserted in file when VEDLMR_PRINT_IN_FILE is TRUE are also
shown on the screen. See HELP * VEDVARS /vedlmr_print_in_file
--- LIB TIME altered so as to give more accurate results, and to
work with 'load marked range' in VED.
Jan 26 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- Procedures attached to <ESC> / and <ESC> \ now give sensible ved
errors if used before any searching has been done. Previously they
mishapped.
Jan 26 (John Williams)
--- The procedure CHARTYPE has been renamed VEDCHARTYPE, and is now
redefinable. It controls the recognition of text item boundaries for
VED searching, and the WORDLEFT and WORDRIGHT keys. The old name
CHARTYPE is still available as a synonym.
Jan 26 (John Williams)
--- The library procedure LAST has been extended to cope with
dynamic lists, all vector classes, and words. See HELP *LAST for
details.
Jan 26 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- ISSUBSTRING_LIM - fixed. Previously 'start_lim' arguments of
false meant that the procedure always returned false.
--- <ENTER> GS and GSR if given no arguments will redraw the
previous search and substitute strings with the delimiter on the
end. Previously there could be problems if the last character of the
substitute string was a space.
--- VVEDGOTOPLACE - minor bug fixed. Problems occurred when it was
an illegal search string.
--- VEDWIGGLE is now sensitive to a new variable VEDWIGGLETIMES.
Default is 5, it can be set to a larger number to slow down the
wiggling on fast terminals.
--- VED_FILL and VED_JJ no longer mishap if VEDLEFTMARGIN is a
procedure.
--- DATAFILE can now record all items, including those with non
printing characters (e.g. SPACE).
Jan 20 (John Williams)
--- PRWARNING is no longer locally bound by VED_LMR and related
procedures that effect compilation in VED.
Jan 20 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- RECORDCLASS and VECTORCLASS macros are now sensitive to
sections. They make a new key if the identifiers are not available
in the current section.
Jan 19 (John Gibson)
--- POPLOG Version 11.1 supports the full range of number types and
numerical procedures specified by Common LISP. The changes are
summarised here; REF * NUMBERS (which replaces REF * ARITH)
describes the new system in full.
Listed by dataword, the system now has the six distinct number
types:
integer }
biginteger } rational numbers
ratio }
decimal } floating-point numbers
ddecimal }
complex
The major change that will affect existing programs is that dividing
one integer by another with / now produces a ratio rather than a
floating-point (except if the division is exact, when the result is
an integer as before). Because you really want floating-point
results (or because you find ratio arithmetic too slow), you may
find it necessary to replace some integer constant divisors with
floating-point values. Otherwise, the changes are upward-compatible
with previous versions.
As well as being constructed by the / operator, ratios can also
be read in as literals by the itemiser. While the obvious way for
ratios to print out would have been <int>/<int>, this format would
have been unsuitable for the itemiser (owing to the problem of
ambiguity with POP-11 operator syntax). It was therefore decided
that ratios should both print and read as <int>_/<int>, e.g.
2 / 3 => ;;; evaluated ratio
** 2_/3
[1_/2 2_/3 -3_/4] => ;;; literal ratios in a list
** [1_/2 2_/3 -3_/4]
A similar format has been adopted for complex numbers: since the
binary operators for constructing these are +: and -:, the
read/print syntax is the same with an additional '_', e.g.
2 +: 3 => ;;; evaluated
** 2_+:3
[1_+:2 2_-:3 -3.0_+:4.0 2_/3_-:3_/4] => ;;; literals
** [1_+:2 2_-:3 -3.0_+:4.0 2_/3_-:3_/4]
See REF * ITEMISE for full details.
Because the system now has full complex arithmetic, certain
operations that used to give a mishap (e.g. -sqrt- applied to a
negative number) will now produce a complex result.
There are quite a few new procedures, listed below:
predicates
---------
isratio
isrational
isreal
iscomplex
integer & rational arithmetic
-----------------------------
gcd_n
lcm_n
destratio
numerator [autoloadable]
denominator [autoloadable]
complex operations
------------------
+: [operator]
-: [operator]
unary_+:
unary_-:
conjugate
destcomplex
realpart [autoloadable]
imagpart [autoloadable]
trigonometric
-------------
phase [autoloadable]
cis [autoloadable]
sinh
cosh
tanh
arcsinh
arccosh
arctanh
bitwise integer procedures
--------------------------
&&/=_0 [operator]
&&=_0 [operator]
testbit
integer_leastbit
integer_length
integer_bitcount
integer_field
random numbers
--------------
random0
floating-point utilities
------------------------
float_decode
float_scale
float_sign
float_digits [autoloadable]
float_precision [autoloadable]
pop_float_radix [autoloadable constant]
lib float_parameters [library]
general
-------
number_coerce
In addition, the existing library procedures
random (+ ranseed)
round
sign
have been moved into the system.
Jan 19 (Aaron Sloman)
--- Undocumented use of characters .,#| in place of / for forward
searching in VED removed. (Relic of wrong decision in 1981).
--- VED_BACKSEARCH (<ENTER> \ and <ESC> \) fixed to find latest
acceptable occurrence in the line, instead of first only.
--- VED_DO provided for multiple commands on VED command line:
<ENTER> do<c>command1<c>command2<c>command3 ...
Commands are separated by any non-space delimeter character <c>.
E.g. to search for FOOO and move down two lines:
<ENTER> do;/FOO;ml 2
See HELP * VEDCOMMS/ved_do and LIB * VED_DO
--- New utility SYSGETUSERNAME(<login name>) -> <user name | false>
added to public library. UNIX ONLY.
Jan 19 (John Williams)
--- Bug in VED_LMR that previously caused POP_CHAROUT_COL to be
VEDCOLUMN when it shouldn't has been fixed. Output into current file
should now work.
Jan 19 (Aaron Sloman)
--- Updated documentation:
HELP *DATASTRUCTURES
HELP *VEDCOMMS
HELP *VEDPROCS
HELP *VEDSYSFILE
HELP *VEDVARS
--- VED procedures now check whether VEDSCREENWIDTH has altered, and
if so change local structures automatically.
This means that LIB * VED_LL can be simplified.
--- VEDERROR altered to call MISHAP unless 'iscaller(vedprocess)'.
--- VED and VED_NAME altered so that VEDERROR rather than MISHAP
called if given a file in non-existent or protected directory.
--- Bug in VEDBUFFEREXTEND fixed. Now, if appropriate, it saves the
new buffer in the current file structure. Previously, changes could
be lost as as a result of inadvertently hitting QUIT key, or exiting
from VEDEDITOR, e.g. by calling SETPOP.
--- VEDSEARCHLIST, default [], is now used by VED and VED_VED to
search for user files, just as VEDHELPLIST is used by HELP. It can
now be assigned to by users, e.g. in VEDINIT.P. (See HELP * INITIAL)
VEDSEARCHLIST may consist of strings naming directories, or lists
whose first element is a directory name, as explained in HELP *
SYSSEARCHPATH, * VEDGETLIBFILENAME, * VEDSYSFILE. As a corollary
various VED procedures can now take a list instead of a string for a
file name, e.g. VEDEDITOR, VEDREADFILE, VEDGETFILE, VEDOPEN. The
first element of the list is used as file name, and the remaining
elements used to initialise global variables.
VED_LMR has been adjusted to take account of the fact that
VEDSEARCHLIST may have to be used to fined the output file.
VEDPRESENT has been altered to use VEDSEARCHLIST, consistently with
VED_VED.
If VEDSEARCHLIST is FALSE or [], behaviour of VED should be exactly
as before.
--- * VEDOPEN can optionally be given TRUE as its final argument. In
that case the new file-structure returned will also be put onto
VEDBUFFERLIST, at the end. (Previously available, but not
documented.)
Jan 19 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- VED_F altered so that it can cope with definitions of lvars and
lconstant procedures and also improved so that it never gets stuck
in a loop or fails to find definitions.
--- VMS POPLOG. SYSFILEOK altered so that the string '][' is
eliminated from file specifications. For example if disk$a is a
logical name for disk$real[subdirectory.] then:
sysfileok('disk$a:[user.mydir]file.p') =>
** disk$real:[subdirectory.user.mydir]file.p
--- VEDFILESELECT moved into the system. It has been slightly
changed to show information more quickly if it can do so and if you
have not typed ahead. It is also more sensitive to window and screen
sizes.
--- LIB VED_GO now removed. VEDFILESELECT is more sophisticated.
--- SystemV UNIX POPLOG. LIB TERMIO installed for handling ioctl
requests as specified by Unix manual termio(7). See HELP * TERMIO.
Corresponds to HELP * IOCTL and the 4 IOCTL libraries for Berkely
unix.
--- VEDREADLINE removed from the system. It is still available as a
library but it should not be necessary as in almost all cases
readline now works better. See HELP * READLINE, * VEDREADLINE.
--- TRACE will now accept <termin> as well as ";" as end of
procedures to trace. It now prints the exit and entry call of
procedures using the name by which they were traced (previously
closures printed as "false"). -trace- no longer constructs an
updater if the untraced procedure didn't have one and a problem with
people unwittingly redefining traced procedures by another name has
now been fixed (by John Williams).
--- LOAD, if given no name will only load the last VEDed file if it
exists and is a POP-11 file (has the '.p' file extension).
--- ISSUBSTRING will no longer mishap if the index is greater than
the length of the string. It will just return false.
--- ISSUBSTRING_LIM a version of ISSUBSTRING which allows you to set
limits beyond which the substring should not be searched for. This
can be efficient particularly if you are looking for a match only at
the beginning of a string. See HELP * ISSUBSTRING_LIM.
Jan 19 (Andrew Law)
--- The procedure VEDPREVIOUSHELP for finding previous asterisks
in a file (set to <ESC> u) has been added to complement
VEDNEXTHELP.
See HELP * VEDPROCS /vedprevioushelp and HELP * VEDGETSYSFILE.
Jan 17 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- SYSTMPFILE documented in REF * SYSUTIL /SYSTMPFILE.
Jan 9 1986 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- SYSFILEMODE a procedure (with an updater) for accessing or
changing the mode (protection) flag for a file.
See HELP * SYSFILEMODE.
Dec 3 1985 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- GENSYM reimplemented as a closure on a property (previously the
property could not be accessed from the procedure). Two new
autoloadable features are also provided CLEARGENSYMPROPERTY and
APPGENSYMPROPERTY. See HELP * GENSYM for details.
Nov 25 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- HELP * CLOCK, a brief summary of procedures which make use of
the system clock.
Nov 14 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- CHARIN_TIMEOUT has been reimplemented using POP_TIMEOUT and
POP_TIMEOUT_SECS in order not to clash with the timer used by
SYSSETTIMER on VMS machines. This means that arguments (given in
hundredths of a second) are rounded to the nearest second.
See HELP * CHARIN_TIMEOUT.
Nov 3 (Aaron Sloman)
--- The command 'umask 0' has been moved from the public to the
local login command file. Users elsewhere have complained that this
has over-ridden local protection defaults.
Oct 28 (Aaron Sloman)
--- Search Bug fixed in VED. It used to get into infinite loops if
search started on final line, looking for non-existent string
starting at beginning of line.
Oct 18 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- SPRINTF library for constructing formatted strings of the kind
printed by PRINTF moved from local library. See HELP * SPRINTF.
Oct 22 (Aaron Sloman)
--- HELP * NEWOBJ extended.
Oct 6 (John Williams)
--- The library procedures UPPERTOLOWER and LOWERTOUPPER have been
made more efficient. Please note that they no longer signal an error
if given a non-numeric argument.
Oct 6 (Aaron Sloman)
--- Bugs in VED due to vvedlinesize not always being updated when
vedline is changed, e.g. after calling VED_D, now removed.
--- HELP * PARAMETERS was not quite correct in its description of
the default $popsavepath. Now corrected to mention $poplocalbin.
Several command files for creating saved images have now been
changed to store them in $poplocalbin.
Oct 4 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- Local ved_print tidied up and moved into the system.
See HELP * VED_PRINT.
Sep 24 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- REF * PROPS updated to refer to *NEWANYPROPERTY.
Sep 16 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- Library search lists VEDHELPLIST, VEDTEACHLIST, VEDREFLIST and
VEDDOCLIST have had their formats changed. Instead of containing
only strings and procedures they can now also contain lists, where
the first element is a string (the directory as before) and there
can optionally be up to two other elements, a word (indicating the
category of the files in the directory e.g. HELP - set to
VEDFILEPROPS) and a procedure (to be used as the compiler activated
by VED_LMR, VED_L etc - set to POPCOMPILER).
This is used by the new procedure * SYSSEARCHPATH, in order to solve
a number of long-standing problems involving interactions between
sub-systems. User programs using these search-lists may have to be
modified. We apologise for the incovenience.
--- Various libraries (e.g. VED_H) that used VEDHELPLIST altered to
cope with new alternative format (see HELP * SYSSEARCHPATH).
Sep 15 (Aaron Sloman)
--- HELP * STRINGS updated, including information about arbitrary
8-bit characters in strings.
Sep 13 (Roger Evans)
--- COPYDATA added: an autoloadable utility which does a full copy
of a data structure (including substructures etc). See HELP
*COPYDATA for details.
Sep 4 (John Gibson)
--- Bigintegers are now integrated properly with record and vector
classes. Integer fields in records and vectors which are wide enough
to hold integers greater than the maximum simple pop integer (i.e.
more than 29 bits unsigned, or more than 30 bits signed), will now
accept or produce bigintegers when appropriate.
--- A long-standing problem with POP-11 list and vector constructors
(i.e. [...] and {...} ) containing a large number of individually-
specified items has been cured. Such lists or vectors could cause
the system to crash under certain conditions.
--- A bug in the run-time assembler for 68000 POPLOG systems has
been fixed. The symptom was that certain very large procedures
produced by the PROLOG compiler did not execute properly and
corrupted memory, causing random crashes.
--- The POP-11 "load" macro has been moved out of the library and
into the system.
Sep 4 (Mark Rubinstein)
--- *VEDGETLIBFILENAME no longer calls *VEDSETUP.
*********** For news prior to Version 12 see HELP * NEWS.V11 ***********
-----<Copyright University of Sussex 1986. All rights reserved.>-------