HELP NEWS.V14_5 Robert Duncan, Oct 1996
For the most recent news, see HELP * NEWS.
1993
Dec 1 (John Williams)
--- Poplog 14.5 now ready for beta-testing.
Nov 24 (John Gibson)
--- ved_ved now deals with editing multiple files, i.e. it splits
vedargument at whitespace boundaries, and edits each of the
resulting filenames.
Nov 10 (John Williams)
--- New procedure sysobjectfile added, for generating machine and
operating system release specific object file names (for use by
applications that might be delivered on more than one platform).
See REF * SYSUTIL for more details.
Oct 29 (Simon Nichols)
--- Two new commands, up and down have been added to LIB * DEBUGGER.
These move up and down the call stack by one frame. Thus, up
selects and displays the frame for the immediate caller, and
down selects and displays the frame of the procedure called from
the current frame. These commands have been added for
convenience, since their effect can be obtained using frame with
the appropriate frame number. See HELP * DEBUGGER for further
information.
Oct 21 (John Gibson)
--- From Version 14.5, Poplog saved images created by syssave and
sys_lock_system no longer attempt to save the run-time state of
externally-loaded code. In particular, they no longer save areas
of dynamic memory allocated by the O/S library memory allocators
malloc (Unix) and lib$get_vm (VMS).
Thus saved images can now only be used to save the state of
external loads immediately after compilation. They cannot now be
used to save the state of external variables and data structures
after external code has been run.
This change was necessitated by various factors. First, external
state-saving never really worked properly anyway (or rather, it
worked partially on some systems but not on others), and
REF * EXTERNAL has always advised against its use.
Second, Poplog's use of shareable libraries under the Solaris
and HP-UX operating systems mean that even that previous
unsatisfactory behaviour is now unsupportable.
See Saving and Restoring Images in REF * EXTERNAL for more
details.
Oct 19 (Simon Nichols)
--- A new library directory, $usepop/pop/lib/proto, has been
introduced to contain prototype versions of new libraries,
supplied for evaluation and comment. Being experimental, the
facilities provided by such libraries may be modified in future.
While all reasonable endeavours will be made to limit
incompatible changes, programs using these facilities may
require modification to utilise later versions.
To make any experimental libraries supplied here accessible, do:
uses popprotolib;
before loading the required prototype library.
Oct 14 (Simon Nichols)
--- A new command, source, has been added to LIB * DEBUGGER. This
displays the source code for the procedure corresponding to the
currently selected frame. This is in contrast to where, which
shows the source for the currently executing procedure.
See HELP * DEBUGGER for further information.
Oct 11 (Simon Nichols)
--- The following bugs in LIB * DEBUGGER have been fixed:
# Breakpoints on nested procedures were not being reported by
the breakpoints command.
# Displaying a stack frame of a procedure with a dlocal active
variable resulted in a mishap.
# The values of dlocal variables of recursive invocations of a
procedure other than the most recent were sometimes
incorrectly reported.
# The animate command did not work correctly.
# The error reporting of the stopat command has been fixed.
Some other minor bugs have also been fixed and general error
reporting somewhat improved.
Oct 08 (Jonathan Meyer)
--- Added postscript_line_consumer, for printing dstrings to PostScript
devices.
--- (Unix Only) ved_print and ved_printmr can now generating PostScript
output which prints Ved Character Attributes correctly. This is done
using the -o <devtype> option, e.g.
<ENTER> print -o ps
prints the current file using PostScript.
See HELP * VED_PRINT REF * postscript_line_consumer.
--- Added ved_draw, for interactively drawing boxes around text
using the cursor keys. It uses the Ved graphics characters, e.g.
-----------------------------
| ABC |----------+----------|
-----------------------------
See REF * ved_draw.
Sep 29 (Jonathan Meyer)
--- Poplog now supports `regular expression' string pattern matching,
as popularised by Unix programs such as awk, grep, ed, etc.
See REF * REGEXP for full details.
--- match_wordswith and ved_wordswith now accept Poplog regular
expression patterns. See HELP * WORDSWITH.
--- The whole of the Ved search and substitution mechanism has been
re-implemented to support regular expression search patterns as
well as a suite of other new search and substitution options
(for example, the ability to constrain a search to a marked range).
See REF * VEDSEARCH for more details.
The changes are largely backwards-compatible. In particular, the
<ENTER> commands work much as they did in the earlier mechanism,
the only notable exception being that, by default, backwards
searches now wrap over the start of the file.
--- The procedural interface to the Ved search mechanism has been
rationalised. The procedures vedcllocate, vedlocate,
vedbacklocate, vedtestsearch, vedtestclsearch are now obsolete
and are replaced by ved_try_search and ved_check_search.
--- The variables used by the Ved search mechanism have been
rationalised. The old search state variables vvedsrchstring,
vvedsrchsize, vvedoldsrchdisplay, vvedinstring, vedfoundline,
vedfoundcol, and vvedanywhere are now obsolete and are replaced
with a single active variable, ved_search_state. Programs that
used to do things like:
dlocal vvedoldsrchdisplay, vvedsrchstring, vvedsrchsize ...
to preserve the ved search state can now simply do
dlocal ved_search_state;
Setting the search state is now done using ved_set_search. You
can query the search state using ved_query_last_search.
The old variables remain for backwards-compatibility.
The variables vvedquery, vvedsrchendline, vvedsrchstartline,
vvedampersand and vvedpercent are no longer used by the Ved
search mechanism.
Sep 23 (John Gibson)
--- Prior to Version 14.5, the procedure gensym was implemented as a
closure of an anonymous procedure whose frozval was the property
maintaining the integer suffixes. This is no longer the case:
the property is now in the variable gensym_property, and gensym
itself is an ordinary constant procedure. If required, use
uses popobsoletelib, old_gensym;
to restore the old implementation.
Sep 16 (Simon Nichols)
--- Important note to users of Poplog running under Solaris 2 and
HP-UX (i.e. dynamically linked versions of Poplog):
# Poplog on Solaris 2 will not run unless the directory
$popexternlib is present in LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Therefore, the
Poplog login script $popcom/poplog adds $popexternlib to
LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Users should beware of redefining, rather
than adding to, LD_LIBRARY_PATH: this is in any case unwise
as other software packages (such as OpenWindows) may also
have added entries to it.
# Poplog on HP-UX will not run unless the directory
$popexternlib is present in SHLIB_PATH. Therefore, the
Poplog login script $popcom/poplog adds $popexternlib to
SHLIB_PATH. Users should beware of redefining, rather than
adding to, SHLIB_PATH: this is in any case unwise as other
software packages may also have added entries to it.
Sep 16 (Simon Nichols)
--- A previous attempt to make LIB * SHOWTREE work when
* pop_pr_quotes is true introduced a number of bugs. In
particular, it no longer respected redefinitions of * pr, which
meant that the Prolog library showtree no longer worked
correctly. These problems have now been fixed. In addition, LIB
SHOWTREE works with pop_pr_quotes true.
Aug 31 (Robert Duncan)
--- The default key map for Ved has been changed: the new set of key
bindings first introduced in Poplog Version 14.0 (vednewkeys)
has now been made the default. These key bindings are described
in HELP * VEDKEYS. Users who have already converted to the new
bindings will see no change; other users who prefer to stick
with the old bindings can do so by adding to the start of their
"vedinit.p" files the lines:
vedoldkeys -> veddefaultkeys;
veddefaultkeys();
The old bindings are documented in HELP * VEDOLDKEYS.
Note that only the standard escape- and control-key bindings are
affected by this change: personal customisations and function
key bindings set up by terminal configuration libraries remain
as before.
Aug 24 (John Gibson)
--- Following the change reported in the HELP NEWS entry for Nov 12,
the new versions of the libraries
showtree actor event newqueue
have replaced the old ones. The old versions have been renamed
old_* in $usepop/pop/lib/obsolete, i.e.
old_showtree old_actor old_event old_newqueue
and thus require
uses popobsoletelib;
to make them accessible via uses.
This (non-upward-compatible) change has been made in order to
encourage the use of the new (POPC-usable) versions. See
HELP * SHOWTREE, * ACTOR, * NEWQUEUE for more details.
Aug 23 (Robert Duncan)
--- The define_parser syntax form has been extended to support what
are called ``meta-symbols'' which can considerably simplify the
specification of large grammars. An example meta-symbol would
be:
OPT(phrase) ::=
/* empty */ { false }
| phrase
;
which expresses the notion of an optional phrase. This meta-
symbol could be applied on the right-hand-side of any subsequent
rule, wherever an optional item is required. For example:
vars ::=
/* empty */ { [] }
| var:v OPT(',') vars:vs { v :: vs }
;
This describes a list of vars, optionally separated by commas.
See HELP * DEFINE_PARSER/Meta.
July 27 (John Williams)
--- The core of the procedure syssort has been separated out and
re-named nc_listsort, providing a fast non-checking and non-
copying merge sort algorithm for lists. See LIB * nc_listsort.
The procedure syssort is still available, however, and is now
defined in terms of nc_listsort.
July 21 (John Williams)
--- The directory $usepop/pop/lib/turtle/ is no longer included in
the default value of popautolist (because the "turtle" libraries
capture some identifier names, e.g. "left" and "right", which
should be available to users). However, the two principal entry
points to the "turtle" package, the procedure turtle and the
library LIB * VTURTLE, remain auto-loadable. Also, a new
library, LIB * POPTURTLELIB, is provided which adds the
directory $usepop/pop/lib/turtle/ to popautolist when loaded.
July 7 (John Williams)
--- News entries relating to Poplog versions 14.1 and 14.2 have
been moved to HELP * NEWS.V14_1 and HELP * NEWS.V14_2
respectively.
July 6 (John Williams)
--- LIB * VEDSUNXTERMKEYS has been enhanced to cope with Sun type 5
keyboards. Documentation is in HELP * SUNXTERMKEYS_TYPE5.
--- HELP * VEDXTERM has been re-organised. The discussion of LIB
VEDXGOTOMOUSE has been moved to a separate HELP file of the
same name. Also, the lists of X key translations needed to get
Ved working on a Sun or HP 9000 have been moved to data files
stored in $popvedlib/term.
July 5 (John Williams)
--- (Unix only). It is now possible to indicate to sys_file_match
that it should call sys_file_stat with the follow_symlinks
argument set false. For details, see REF * sys_file_match and
REF * sys_file_stat.
Jun 30 (John Williams)
--- The Ved command <ENTER> mp now skips over bracket characters
that are enclosed between Pop-11 character quotes (`).
--- The ordering of the arguments to the eq_p procedure in the
procedures delete, ncdelete, and fast_ncdelete has been
standardised. They all now call
eq_p(list_element, item)
whereas previously ncdelete and fast_ncdelete called eq_p with
the arguments the other way round. See REF * LISTS.
Jun 29 (Simon Nichols)
--- From Poplog version 14.23, Poplog will be additionally available
on the following platforms:
o Sun Sparc running Solaris 2.2
o HP 9000/700 (Precision architecture) running HP-UX 9.0
Unlike previous versions of Poplog, these are both dynamically
linked against shared libraries. This means that Poplog images
will be smaller and consume less system resources.
--- From Poplog version 14.23, Poplog on HP 9000/300 will also be
dynamically linked against shared libraries.
--- Dynamically linked versions of Poplog use a new implementation
of the low level internals of exload. The reimplementation has
been done using the programmatic interface to the dynamic linker
provided by the operating system (see REF * EXTERNAL for
details). It has the following practical effects:
o Instead of relocatable object files, exload now links in
shared objects (also known as shared libraries). There is
hardly any extra effort involved in creating a shared object
as opposed to a relocatable object. The following examples
are taken from REF * EXTERNAL/Input File Arguments:
To produce a shared object 'test.so' corresponding to the C
source file 'test.c' on a Sun Solaris 2 system:
% cc -o test.so -G -K pic test.c
To produce a shared library 'test.sl' corresponding to the C
source file 'test.c' on HP-UX:
% cc -c +z test.c
% ld -o test.sl -b test.o
For further details see REF * EXTERNAL and the appropriate
operating system/language processor manual.
o When making saved images, syssave and sys_lock_system should
not be used to save the results of external functions that
have already been run. (Note that this was always a dubious
practice and not guaranteed to work on all systems). This is
because shared objects are reloaded in their initial state
when a saved image is restored: external functions and data
are no longer placed in the saved image file, with
beneficial effects on their sizes (and thus disk usage). For
details see REF * EXTERNAL/Saving and Restoring Images.
o Because external loads are redone in one go when a saved
image is restored, the saved object files must exist and be
accessible in their original locations when the saved image
is restored. This is not quite as restrictive as it might
seem, since a shared object file may be referenced using a
path name which includes one or more environment variables.
These will be translated when the saved image is restored.
For further details on the previous two points see
REF * EXTERNAL/Saving and Restoring Images.
Jun 18 (Adrian Howard)
--- Three new Ved procedures to aid the writing of REF files have
been added. See * ved_idprops, * ved_jrefmr, and * ved_slrhs for
more information.
--- The procedures created by * shadowclass now have the correct
pdnargs.
Jun 14 (John Gibson)
--- uses may now take a non top-level identifier pathname as the
library name argument, e.g.
uses $-foo$-baz;
This searchs the directories in popuseslist for a filename
called
S-fooS-baz.p
i.e. the corresponding filename is got by replacing `$`
characters in the identifier pathname with `S`.
Note that you must specify the full identifier pathname starting
with $-, since the current section is NOT taken into account.
This facility is intended for use with uses only, and not for
autoloading. (It will actually work with autoloading for a
reference to the full identifier pathname, but not for a
relative reference within the current section.)
Jun 4 (John Williams)
--- The procedure sys_read_lines can now take an extra (optional)
boolean argument, for specifying whether the text to be read
uses the new Ved character attributes (in which case
vedfile_line_repeater is used to read from the file).
See REF * sys_read_lines for details.
May 28 (John Williams)
--- New Ved command <ENTER> newheading added, for creating new-style
document section headers. See REF * ved_newindex.
May 28 (John Williams)
--- The procedures ved_? and ved_?? (Ved commands <ENTER> ? and
<ENTER> ??) now display mixed-case REF file names correctly.
May 25 (John Gibson)
--- Fixed a bug in biginteger multiplication where the result was
negative instead of positive when multiplying two negative
bigintegers which were both powers of 2**31.
May 18 (John Williams)
--- The procedure readstringline now ignores trailing spaces in
the input line.
May 13 (John Gibson)
--- Fixed the Ved input character processing mechanism and vedsetkey
to deal properly with characters-with-attributes and 8-bit
characters. Thus the vedsetkey translation string of an input
character sequence can now contain attributes and Ved graphics
characters, etc.
May 10 (John Williams)
--- New procedure is_ved_output_file added, for recognising Ved
"output" files. This procedure is used in the default value of
vedfiletypes, in order to set vedcompileable false for output
files. See REF * VEDPROCS and HELP * VEDFILETYPES.
May 7 (Adrian Howard)
--- New for-form in_dstring added for iterating over dstrings. See
HELP * FOR_FORM.
May 7 (John Williams)
--- New procedures discin_device and discout_device added, for
accessing the device records associated with the character
repeater/consumer procedures created by discin and discout
respectively. See REF * CHARIO.
May 04 (Adrian Howard)
--- A new procedure app_subsystems applies a user procedure to the
name of every subsystem in sys_subsystem_table.
See REF * SUBSYSTEM for details
May 03 (Adrian Howard)
--- A new generic type-checking procedure check_item has been added.
See REF * DATA for full details.
Apr 30 (John Gibson)
--- exload_batch now merges the object-file lists from all exloads
within its range that do not have the (no batching) attribute.
(Thus it produces a single call to external_do_load when the
final endexload_batch is encountered.) See the section
batching Attribute in REF * EXTERNAL for more details.
Apr 23 (John Gibson)
--- A new procedure * is_vedfile_local enables the value of any
variable to be localised to an individual Ved file.
See REF * VEDPROCS.
--- Using is_vedfile_local, the Ved immediate mode mechanism now
sets vvedpromptchar to the prompt-marker space character (`\Sp`)
only locally in an immediate mode file. Outside of this context,
vvedpromptchar is false (making `\Sp` behave as a normal
character).
--- Also using is_vedfile_local, there is now a Ved command
* ved_dssp (i.e. <ENTER> dssp -- Display Special SPaces) which
causes all the Ved special space characters to be displayed as
visible characters, but in the current file only.
See REF * VEDCOMMS and Ved Special Space Characters in
REF * VEDPROCS.
Apr 20 (John Williams)
--- New option added to vedexpandchars: ^p, which expands to the
directory name of the current Ved file. See HELP * VEDEXPAND for
details.
Apr 16 (Robert Duncan)
--- Various changes to newpop:
The installation step -- copying a new basepop11 to $popsys --
is now optional, selected with the option install. Previously
this step was compulsory, making it difficult to use newpop
incrementally. Now a command such as:
newpop -link only
does exactly as it suggests: it links newpop11 and no more. The
default configuration file for newpop has been changed to
include the install option and so works exactly as before; users
who have created their own configuration files may wish to add
the install option where appropriate.
The options x, commands and images -- which have no effect
except in conjunction with other options -- are now selected by
default: you must specify nox, nocommands or noimages if you
wish to override them. This change makes no difference to a
standard installation, but can reduce the number of command-line
options needed to perform particular tasks. For example, the
link command given above will now build a newpop11 which
includes X support (because x is assumed given); you must
specify nox in the command if you don't want it. Also, a command
such as:
newpop -xved only
is sufficient both to build the XVed saved image and install
xved as a shell/DCL command.
The strategy for deciding which libraries to use when linking
against X has been made more sophisticated to cope better with
system-specific configurations.
See HELP * NEWPOP for full details.
Apr 15 (David Young)
--- LIB * GAMMA revised completely and HELP * GAMMA updated.
Mar 15 (John Williams)
--- New procedure sys_file_exists added - see REF * SYSIO for
details.
Feb 19 (John Gibson)
--- There is now a new style of index for Poplog documentation
files, based on numbered sections and sub-sections. See for
example REF * EXTERNAL, REF * VEDCOMMS, HELP * VEDSET.
The new-style indexes will gradually replace the old.
However, <ENTER> g (i.e. ved_g) recognises both, and moves
to the appropriate section in the file.
The new indexes are constructed with <ENTER> newindex -- see
REF * ved_newindex.
Feb 17 (Ian Rogers)
--- Extended XptResourceInfo so the first argument can now also be a
WidgetClass. Ensures that the widget class is initialised before
attempting to extract the resources.
Feb 15 (John Gibson)
--- The whole subsystem mechanism has been re-implemented and moved
from lib subsystem into the system core (lib subsystem no longer
exists).
The changes are largely backwards-compatible. In particular, the
subscr_subsystem interface to subsystem fields remains as
before, except that the integer subscripts are now defined in
INCLUDE * SUBSYSTEM.
An important aspect of the new system is that a subsystem record
may be present in sys_subsystem_table without its compiler (and
other associated procedures) actually being loaded; this has
made possible the creation of separate libraries for the Prolog,
Lisp and SML subsystems records (defining only their
searchlists and file extensions fields, etc).
See LIB * PROLOG_SUBSYSTEM, * LISP_SUBSYSTEM, * ML_SUBSYSTEM.
There are now also subsystem libraries for the operating-system
command interpreters LIB * CSH_SUBSYSTEM, * SH_SUBSYSTEM (Unix),
LIB * DCL_SUBSYSTEM (VMS).
A new subsystem can be constructed with subsystem_add_new.
See REF * SUBSYSTEM for further details.
--- As part of the above changes, the function of the old Ved
variable popcompiler is now performed by the variable subsystem.
That is, instead of an associated compiler procedure, each Ved
file now has an associated subsystem name.
This means that vedfiletypes should now set values for subsystem
depending on a file's extension, etc. However, popcompiler
remains as an autoloadable active variable which returns or
updates the procedure corresponding to subsystem, and thus
settings for popcompiler in vedfiletypes will now set subsystem
instead.
Private compiler procedures previously being assigned to
popcompiler can now easily be turned into subsystems using
* subsystem_add_new. The updater of popcompiler actually does
this for you, but in order to specify things like the file
extension and prompt fields properly, it is recommended that you
switch to calling subsystem_add_new explicitly yourself, and
cease using popcompiler altogether.
(If your compiler procedure is autoloadable, the following
technique can be used: instead of a vedfiletypes entry
[ '.foo' {popcompiler foo_compile} ]
where foo_compile is autoloadable, use
[ '.foo' {subsystem foo_subsystem} ]
where foo_subsystem autoloads your subsystem and compiler, and
is itself set to have the value "foo", i.e. the subsystem name.)
Jan 25 (John Williams)
--- New option to printf added: %S. This prints an argument as a
literal string, ignoring % and any other special characters.
See HELP * printf.
Jan 22 (John Williams)
--- The messages printed by the syntax words load, lib, pwd, and the
Ved commands ved_lp, ved_lpr, ved_lcol and ved_rcol no longer
contain string quotes, irrespective of the value of
pop_pr_quotes.
Jan 12 (John Williams)
--- * line_repeater can now be given <false> as its second argument,
in which case a default maximum line size of 80 is assumed.
Also, it now signals a proper MISHAP if the file doesn't exist,
or can't be opened for reading (previously a system error
occurred).
1992
Dec 18 (Simon Nichols)
--- All printing in LIB *DEBUGGER is now done with pr locally
assigned the value of the procedure variable debugger_pr, whose
default value is syspr. This has two consequences: firstly, the
debugger now respects any customized printing procedures you may
have defined as the *CLASS_PRINT of particular items' keys.
Previously, all printing was effectively done with pr locally
assigned to be sys_syspr (Poplog's standard printing procedure).
Secondly, you can change the value of debugger_pr; thus, if your
customized printing procedures contain bugs, you can assign
sys_syspr to debugger_pr to prevent them being called.
See HELP *DEBUGGER for details.
Dec 17 (John Meyer)
--- Changed *mkimage so that the -nonwriteable flags controls the
writeability of both closures and datastructures. (Previously,
closures were made nonwriteable even if you did not specify the
'nonwriteable' flag). See HELP * MKIMAGE/Optional Flags.
Dec 11 (John Gibson)
--- The procedure syswait now waits for an (operating-system)
child process to terminate using syshibernate. The major
consequence of this is that XVed will continue to operate
when running a shell process in the basewindow, etc.
Nov 27 (David Young)
--- LIB * FORTRAN_DEC (see * EXTERNAL) now expands macros in the
pseudo-Fortran that it parses, so that, for example, the same
code can be used for single and double precision versions of a
library.
Nov 27 (Robert Duncan)
--- A new library LIB * LR_PARSER defines an LALR(1) parser
generator and driver, analogous to the UNIX utility yacc(1).
The main feature of the library is a * define_form for parsers:
define :parser <name>();
...
enddefine;
which derives a procedure definition from a context-free
grammar. Actions for the parser are written in Pop11.
An alternative procedural interface to the library makes it
possible to create parsers dynamically, without using the
define-form. This makes the facilities potentially accessible
from languages other than Pop11.
Relevant documentation:
HELP * DEFINE_PARSER
Describes the syntactic interface.
HELP * LR_PARSER
Gives an overview of LR parsing and an introduction to
the library.
REF * LR_PARSER
Describes the procedural interface in detail.
Nov 26 (David Young)
--- Moved the procedures rc_clip_region and rc_set_coord_frame
out of LIB * RCG_UTILS and into separate libraries of their own,
to reflect their general usefulness. Documentation put into
HELP * RC_GRAPHIC and HELP * RC_GRAPHPLOT also updated.
Nov 17 (John Williams)
--- The Ved commands <ENTER> dir and <ENTER> ls (for listing
directories on VMS and Unix platforms respectively) no longer
create temporary disk files, which means that they can be used
safely after a "DISK QUOTA EXCEEDED" error. This also applies to
the <ENTER> PURGE command. See LIB * ved_dir and LIB * ved_ls.
Also, the following related HELP files have been revised:
HELP * LS, HELP * DIR, HELP * PURGE, HELP * DEL
and the following obsolete libraries have been removed:
LIB VED_FDIR, LIB VED_NDIR
Nov 12 (John Gibson)
--- There is now a new directory
$usepop/pop/lib/obsolete
into which various obsolete libraries will begin to be moved
after Version 14.5 of the system. There is a new library
LIB * POPOBSOLETELIB which adds this directory to popuseslist;
thus
uses popobsoletelib;
will make this directory available for subsequent library
searches by uses, etc.
--- Owing to the highly non-modular set of identifier names they
employed, the following libraries in $popliblib have been
superseded by new versions which define a more modular set of
names:
LIB SHOWTREE --> LIB NEW_SHOWTREE (see HELP * SHOWTREE)
LIB ACTOR --> LIB NEW_ACTOR (see HELP * ACTOR)
LIB EVENT --> LIB ACTOR_EVENT ( " " " )
In all cases, the old versions now load the new versions and
then define the old identifier names as synonyms for the new
ones. (After Version 14.5, the old files will be moved to
$usepop/pop/lib/obsolete, and will thus require
'uses popobsoletelib;' to make them accessible.)
Nov 11 (john Gibson)
--- Fixed bug in Ved search substition -- character attributes in
substitute string were being ignored.
Nov 1 (John Gibson)
--- New constants pop_undef and pop_undef_p added. These contain
respectively the standard undef record and undef-closure used to
initialise top-level lexical variables, etc. See REF * IDENT.
Note that one reason for making pop_undef readily accessible is
to enable Pop-11 non-opener syntax words to be explicitly
initialised to an undef, e.g.
constant syntax endexload = pop_undef;
Previously, such words had named undef records as their values,
simply by virtue of not being initialised. However, POPC
compilation will require that all such words have an explicit
initialisation (it also saves the space occupied by the named
undefs in the ordinary system).
Oct 27 (John Gibson)
--- There is now a bit POP11_PERM_GLOBAL in pop_pop11_flags, and a
corresponding compile_mode keyword :pop11 +global, which causes
all vars and constant declarations to be made automatically
global (including implicit ones made with define, etc).
Moreover, this bit is now set by the :pop11 +strict option to
compile_mode, ie +strict will make all declarations global. If
required, the new syntax word nonglobal enables this to be
overriden (and may be used anywhere that global can).
See REF * SECTIONS, Global Identifiers.
Oct 26 (John Gibson)
--- Pop-11 quoted word syntax may now be used to get word
identifiers for permanent identifiers, by surrounding any ident
expression with word quotes, e.g.
"ident foo" -> baz;
"ident $-mysect$-xxxx" -> word_id;
Oct 19 (John Gibson)
--- New macro #_TERMIN_IF added. This can be used (for example) to
terminate an include file that is already present, e.g.
#_TERMIN_IF DEF VEDFILE_STRUCT_INCLUDED
See REF * PROGLIST. (This replaces the previous unsatisfactory
usage
#_IF DEF VEDFILE_STRUCT_INCLUDED
[ %"'#_ENDIF'"% ] -> proglist;
#_ENDIF
etc, which as well as being clumsy will not work correctly with
POPC compilation.)
Sep 24 (John Gibson)
--- Closures may now be constructed with upto around 65,000 frozvals
(the exact limit is implementation dependent). Previously,
attempting to construct a closure with more than the old limit
of 255 truncated the actual number.
Sep 17 (John Gibson)
--- The newpop installation command now has an option "stripdoc",
which causes it to remove all special Ved character encodings
from all documentation files. See HELP * NEWPOP.
Sep 14 (John Williams)
--- Some obsolete Ved libraries and associated documentation have
been removed from the system: LIB L4000, L4004, L5000, and
VEDBELMYE; also HELP L4000. They were used for running Ved on
Lyme terminals.
Sep 13 (John Gibson)
--- A new external pointer class structure, dataword "exptr_mem",
has been added. initexptr_mem(nbytes) creates a fixed-address
structure whose external pointer points into itself at an area
of memory of size nbytes bytes. (This thus replaces the previous
rather cumbersome necessity to create a separate (ordinary)
external pointer pointing to a string or an intvec, etc.)
--- The macro EXPTRINITSTR has been changed to use initexptr_mem.
--- The new procedure sys_grbg_fixed(fixed_struct) can be used to
directly free the memory occupied by any fixed-address
structure. (This is intended particularly for use with
exptr_mems.)
See REF * EXTERNAL_DATA for details of these changes.
Sep 9 (Adrian Howard)
---
A new Ved command ved_qand has been added. See REF * ved_qand
for details. It quits the current file then executes its
argument as a Ved command. This means you can do things like
<ENTER> qand ref lists
instead of:
<ENTER> qref lists
Sep 7 (Adrian Howard)
--- Installed new version of ved_ul implemented using the new Ved
character attribute facilities. This means the results of
LIB * PAGE and LIB * RNO can now be viewed without the aid of
ved_noul.
Sep 4 (John Gibson)
--- The <typespec> mechanism used in defclass, exacc, etc now
allows a new basic field type "exval". This is the same as
"exptr" for field accessing (i.e. returns an external pointer),
but for updating it allows any object to be assigned into the
field; the actual value inserted is got by processing the object
in a similar way to an external function argument. See Field
Specifiers for POPLOG Data in REF * KEYS.
Sep 03 (Adrian Howard)
--- ved_h now works as expected when pop_pr_quotes is true
Aug 26 (John Gibson)
--- The external <typespec> syntax now allows external function
arguments to be declared using dummy argument names, e.g.
l_typespec foobaz(x, y, z) :int;
A variadic function can be declared with the special argument
name "...", e.g.
l_typespec afunc(a, b, c, ...) :void;
The principal purpose of these enhancements is to allow
individual argument(s) to be flagged with <SF>, viz
p_typespec foobaz(x, y<SF>, z) :int;
When the function is called with exacc, this will cause a
decimal or ddecimal passed for that argument to be passed as a
machine single float rather than (the default) double. This is
necessary for new-style ANSI C function declarations involving a
"float" argument, as in
int foobaz(int x, float y, int z)
where the argument y will be expected as a single rather than a
double. (Note, however, that even in an ANSI compiler, a
function declared in the old style,
int foobaz(x, y, z)
float y;
int x, z;
still expects a double for the y argument.)
See the sections External Compound Types: Functions in
REF * DEFSTRUCT and Calling External Functions: Floating-Point
Arguments in REF * EXTERNAL.
--- The boolean values <false> and <true> can now be passed as
arguments to external function calls with exacc etc, and will be
translated to 0 and 1 respectively.
Aug 12 (John Williams)
--- LIB * POPHOST now uses sys_host_id to infer the value associated
with "machine serial number". This value will always be either a
(big)integer or a string. See HELP * POPHOST for details.
Aug 7 (Robert Duncan)
--- The specification of sys_host_id has been changed so that it
might now return the host identification as a string rather than
a number. This is to satisfy System V Release 4 Unix systems
which define the hardware serial number as a string, possibly
containing non-numeric characters. The actual result returned on
existing systems should remain unchanged. See REF * sys_host_id.
Aug 7 (John Williams)
--- UNIX ONLY: it is now possible to specify whether the procedures
* sys_file_stat and * sysdelete should follow symbolic links.
See REF * SYSUTIL and REF * SYSIO.
Jul 29 (John Williams)
--- Minor bug in LIB * ved_sourcefile fixed - it now classes files
as "lib" or "src" appropriately. Also, new user-assignable
procedure * vedsrcfiledefaults defined by LIB * ved_sourcefile.
Jul 22 (John Gibson)
--- Since Ved now supports underlining directly, the procedure
ved_ul has been removed from the Ved library.
For earlier news please see HELP * NEWS.V14_2
--- C.all/help/news.v14_5
--- Copyright University of Sussex 1996. All rights reserved.