newLISP® v.10.1 Release Notes rev 2009/12/03

Version 10.1.1 June 22nd, 2009 is a stable release update with bug fixes and minor feature additions tagged in this text with (v.10.1.1).
Version 10.1.2 July 22nd, 2009 is a maintenance release for Win32 only.
Version 10.1.5 September 15th, 2009 is a maintenance release for all flavors. Changes, additions and fixes are tagged with (v.10.1.5).
Version 10.1.6 October 20th, 2009 is a maintenance release for all flavors. Changes, additions and fixes are tagged with (v.10.1.6).
Version 10.1.7 November 24th, 2009 is a maintenance release for all flavors. Changes, additions and fixes are tagged with (v.10.1.7).

Improved support for concurrency and multi core CPUs

Release 10.1 improves concurrency support for multi core CPUs with new messaging functions for parent and child processes launched with spawn. The new non-blocking API works without locks and semaphores and is safe against collisions. Besides constants, any expression with any size can be transferred with the new send and receive functions. Objects bigger then the OS's shared memory pagesize are transferred using files internally. The new message API is only available on Mac OS X, Linux and other UNIX.

New and changed functionality

• dotree can filter hash symbols starting with an underscore character as used in hashes and bayes-train when using an optional true flag.
• The experimental and not documented estack function has been removed from the code (v.10.1.7).
• expand when used with an association list as second parameter can now take an optional third boolean parameter to indicate evaluation of the value part in associations:

(expand '(a b) '((a (+ 1 2)) (b (+ 3 4))) true) → (3 7)

• expand and letex now also expand symbols on the top level of an expression or letex body:

(set 'x 123 'y 456)
(expand 'x 'x)          → 123 ; threw error before
(letex (x 'y) x)        → 456 ; returned y before
(letex (x '(+ 3 4)) x)  → 7   ; returned (+ 3 4) before

• Eliminated stack-size dependence in functions find and map.
• find for strings can take an additional offset option (v.10.1.1).
• HTTPD server mode now does URL-translation of path/file names. This allows processig of filenames with embedded spaces (v.10.1.7).
• A new inf? predicate tests if a number is infinite:

  (inf? (div 1 0)) → true
  

  Before, a floating point division by zero would throw a "divsion by zero" error.
• lambda - functions now can be of unlimited length in their body without affecting the runtime result-stack. Before the number of statements in a lambda was limited to 2 to 4 thousand.
• New last-error replaces eliminated error-number and error-text and returns number and text in a list consistent with the behavior of net-error and sys-error. All three functions now behave the same way and can enumerate all errors when given the error number as parameter.
• net-eval can take either an expression or a string for remote evaluation (v.10.1.1). In previous versions only a string was accepted. Note that in any case symbol bindings are in the remote environment.
• net-ping does not require root/superuser privileges anymore when on Mac OS X (v.10.1.7).
• The prob-z function is now implemented using the error function errf and gives results with a higher precision.
• The receive function receives a messge from a parent or child process launched with spawn.
• New reader-event specifies an event handler to translate expressions as they are read by newLISP when loading source. This can be used to create a reader, rewrite macro facility (v.10.1.6).
• ref should use $it instead of $0 to refer to the found expression. The usage of $0 in this function is deprecated (10.1.6).
• ref and ref-all now take an optional true parameter to return the elements found instead of index vectors. This is a convenient new feature when searching for elements in translated XML and JSON data (10.1.7).
• regex can take an additional offset option (v.10.1.1).
• The send functions sends a message to a parent or child process launched with spawn.
• Any datatype can now be specified as a start expression in series (v.10.1.1).
• set-ref and set-ref-all should use $it instead of $0 to refer to the found expression(s). The usage of $0 in these functions is deprecated (10.1.6).
• The share function now can share any lisp expression and size. On older versions only boolean, number and strings constants were supported.
• The function swap now can swap the contents of two places in lists, arrays or variables specifying locations in the same form as done by the functions setf or setq and inc or dec. The old syntax of swap using three parameters has been eliminated. The new syntax also allows swapping places from two different data objects. In the old form this was only possible when swapping the contents of two variables. Now two elements from two different lists or arrays can be swapped too:

; swap places in one list
(set 'lst '(a b c d e f))
(swap (first lst) (last lst)) → a
lst                           → (f b c d e a)

; swap places in two lists
(set 'lst-b '(x y z))
(swap (lst 0) (lst-b -1)) → f
lst                       → (z b c d e a)
lst-b                     → (x y f)

(set 'lst '((a 1 2 3) (b 10 20 30)))
(swap (lookup 'a lst -1) (lookup 'b lst 1))
lst → ((a 1 2 10) (b 3 20 30))

• swap now can work in-place like inc, dec, pop, push, replace, rotate, sort, write-buffer and write-line always could (10.1.7).
• The function sys-info now also returns the process id (pid) of the parent process which launched the current process using fork or spawn. The pid is 0 (zero) if newLISP was launched not from fork or spawn. The pid can be found at position -4. It is recommended to access the last four members with negative offsets, to be compatible with older versions of newLISP.
• New -t connection-timeout commandline option, specifies timeout in micrsoseconds after connection when in demon mode. This avoids an unresponsive server when a client connects without further action.
(v.10.1.5).
• The function time not returns floating point milliseconds. The decimal precision depends on the platform (v.10.1.5).
• The function time-of-day not returns floating point milliseconds. The decimal precision depends on the platform (v.10.1.5).
• All functions using URL's now correctly recognize IPv6 format when running the IPv6 compiled version of newLISP. The IPv6 compiled version now runs qa-net correctly and net-ping is IPv6 capable too (v.10.1.7).
• The function write-buffer now behaves like write-line. When no parameters are given the contents of (current-line) line is written to stdout without the the line-feed. Whithout the second parameter the contents of (current-line) is written to either the string buffer or file handle specified in the first parameter.
• The new xfer-event function monitors byte-transfer in get-url, post-url and put-url and in all file operations which take URLs:

(xfer-event (fn (n) (println "->" n)))

(length (get-url "http://newlisp.org"))
->10240
->11221
11221

• In the string representation of built-in primitive functions the space between the function name and the hexadecimal number has been eliminated. This way the string representation of built-in functions is limited to one token (10.1.7).

Changes and additions in external files

• The MySQL interface using the mysql.lsp module file has been ovehauled and the mysql5.lsp and mysql51.lwp module files have been eliminated. The new mysql.lsp should be version independent for versions including and after 4.0.
• A new postgres.lsp interfaces to the PostSQL database.
• The SQLite sqlite3.lsp module has been expanded with parameter binding fucntionality for safer ussage of the database in web applications, where the danger of SQL injection exists. Bug fixes (v.10.1.6). A new sql3:colnames function has been added to the sqlite3.lsp module (10.1.7).
• All three modules mysql.lsp, postgres.lsp and sqlite3.lsp have also been tested on 64-Bit newLISP.
• The documentation utility newlispdoc now accepts custom tags. Any line starting with ;; @mytag my description will be formatted like any other tag line, but has no effect other wise.
• In the newLISP-GS editor newlisp-edit(.lsp) in both the editor and the monitor pane, font face and size now can be changed interactively.
• Added makefiles for 64-bit BSD, tested on OpenBSD and for ARM Nokia 810.
• When installing using make install or when installing from the UBUNTU Linux binary installer, a newlisp-x.x.x and a symbolic link is created for newlisp → newlisp.x.x.x, where x.x.x is the version number. This older versions of the newLISP binary are not deleted and are still accessible. The binary installers for Win32 and Mac OS X have not changed.
• When building newLISP on Mac OS X or other Unix, make check is now recognized additionally to make test and make all check will make and test.
• An alternative configure script configure-alt has been added see doc/INSTALL for details (v.10.1.1).
• A new version of nls (combined newLISP and BASH shell) has been adapted to the new manual formatting introduced (v.10.1.5).
• The new module macro.lsp implements a rewrite macro facility (v.10.1.6).

Bug fixes

• bind did not allow for recursive-incremental definitions.
• The definition of legal? for symbols was too restrictive and caused longer code than necessary when serializing symbols using save or source
• All event handling functions, command-event, error-event, prompt-event, reader-event, timer and xfer-event now can take either nil or 'nil (quoted) to disable an event handler. Before only quoted 'nil was working, and unquoted nil crashed under some circumstances (v.10.1.7).
• eval-string did not restore correct eror handling when an error procedure was specified in the parameters (v.10.1.1). This could lead to crashes on subsequent error conditions.
• The inf return value in floating point opertions is now signed (v.10.1.6):
  

  (div -1 0) → -inf 

• mod now returns NaN when the divisor (second argument) is 0 (v.10.1.6):
  

  (mod 10 0) → NaN 

• The floating point division zero by zero and subtracting two infinite numbers from each other will now return NaN:

  (NaN? (div 0 0)) → true
  
  (set 'infinite (div 1 0))
  (NaN? (sub infinite infinite)) → true
  

• Some HTTP errors where not registered in net-error.
• Now accepts characters > 127 in HTTP headers received from remote servers in web functions (10.1.7).
• Treatment of missing arguments in map is improved (10.1.7):

      (map list '(a b) (A)) => ((a A) b) ; not ((a A (b nil))
      (map string '(a b) '(1)) => ("a1" "b") ; not ("a1" "bnil")
  

• An unknown host result with net-lookup is now registered and can be retrieved with net-error.
• Passing a wrong argument type for the buffer in net-receive could cause a crash (10.1.7).
• pack did no convert from floats (doubles) to integers only from integers to floats. Now pack will correctly convert in both directions.
• The replace in remove mode did not work correctly when all list members where nil.
• Memory was not freed correctly when using starts-with/ends-with with regular expressions (v.10.1.6).
• In some instances setf would not recognize a missing symbol reference and do nothing, instead of throwing an error (10.1.7).
• Under some circumstances nil and true could confuse the sort and unique functions i (v.10.1.0) (v.10.1.6).
• swap now throws and error when the second parameter is mising (v.10.1.1).
• In the guiserver.lsp library the function gs:color-tag was documented but not implemented (v.10.1.1). Tnis is an important function when implementing animations and board games.
• Fixed a memory mapping problem surfacing on IBM AIX compiled newLISP.
• Better handling of status in HTTP headers sent back from newLISP server mode.
• Net sessions list now avoids socket doubles in server mode (v.10.1.5).
• Copying a zero-length file will not throw an error anymore (v.10.1.5).