2nd Beta of gawk 3.1.2 available

[Aharon Robbins]

This note is to announce the second BETA release of patch 2 to version
3.1 of gawk.

It is available from:

        ftp://ftp.freefriends.org/arnold/gawk/gawk-3.1.1n.tar.gz
        ftp://ftp.freefriends.org/arnold/gawk/gawk-3.1.1n.tar.bz2

and from:

        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk-3.1.1n.tar.gz
        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk-3.1.1n.tar.bz2

Overall, this release fixes a number of bugs, as well as offering performance
improvements in both space and time for arrays, time for function calls,
and several other areas.  The list of changes from the NEWS file is
appended, below.

Since the first beta release, the regex library has been synced with that
of GLIBC, and some performance improvements have been made.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.  Other than changing the version and patch levels, this
is what I expect to release as 3.1.2.

So, why do a beta release? So that you, yes you, the end user, can see
if anything I've done breaks gawk for you.  Then you can TELL ME ABOUT
IT so that I can fix it for the final release.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
address@hidden
---------------------------------------------
Changes from 3.1.1 to 3.1.2
---------------------------

1. Loops of the form:

        for (iggy in foo)
                next

   no longer leak memory.

2. gawk -v FIELDWIDTHS="..." now sets PROCINFO["FS"] correctly.

3. All builtin operations and functions should now fully evaluate their
   arguments so that side effects take place correctly.

4. Fixed a logic bug in gsub/gensub for matches to null strings that occurred
   later in the string after a nonnull match.

5. getgroups code now works on Ultrix again.

6. Completely new version of the full GNU regex engine now in place.

7. Argument parsing and variable assignment has been cleaned up.

8. An I/O bug on HP-UX has been documented and worked around. See
   README_d/README.hpux.

9. awklib/grcat should now compile correctly.

10. Updated to automake 1.7.3, autoconf 2.57 and gettext 0.11.5 ; thanks to
    Paul Eggert for the initial automake and autoconf work.

11. As a result of #6, removed the use of the dfa code from GNU grep.

12. It is now possible to use ptys for |& two-way pipes instead of
    pipes.  The basic plumbing for this was provided by Paolo Bonzini.
    To make this happen:

        command = "unix command etc"
        PROCINFO[command, "pty"] = 1

        print ... |& command
        command |& getline stuff

    In other words, set the element in PROCINFO *before* opening the
    two-way pipe, and then gawk will use ptys instead of pipes.

    On systems without ptys or where all the ptys are in use, gawk
    will fall back to using plain pipes.

13. Fixed a regex matching across buffer boundaries bug, with a
    heuristic.  See io.c:rsre_get_a_record().

14. Profiling no longer dumps core if there are extension functions in place.

15. Grammar and scanner cleaned up, courtesy of Stepen Kasal, to hopefully
    once and for all fix the `/=' operator vs. `/=.../' regex ambiguity.
    Lots of other grammar simplifications applied, as well.

16. BINMODE should work now on more Windows ports.

17. Updated to bison 1.875.  Includes fix to bisonfix.sed script.

18. The NODE structure is now 20% (8 bytes) smaller (on x86, anyway), which
    should help conserve memory.

19. Builds not in the source directory should work again.

20. Arrays now use 2 NODE's per element instead of three. Combined with
    #18, (on the x86) this reduces the overhead from 120 bytes per element
    to just 64 bytes: almost a 50% improvement.

21. Programs that make heavy use of changing IGNORECASE should now be
    much faster, particularly if using a regular expression for FS or RS.
    IGNORECASE now correctly affects RS regex record splitting, as well.

22. IGNORECASE no longer affects single-character field splitting (FS = "c"),
    or single-character record splitting (RS = "c").

    This cleans up some weird behavior, and makes gawk better match the
    documentation, which says it only affects regex-based field splitting
    and record splitting.

    The documentation on this was improved, too.

23. The framework in test/ has been simplified, making it much easier to
    add new tests while keeping the size of Makefile.am reasonable. Thanks
    for this to Stepan Kasal.

24. --lint=invalid causes lint warnings only about stuff that's actually
    invalid.  This needs additional work.

25. More translations.

26. The get_a_record() routine has been revamped (currently by splitting it
    into three variants).  This should improve long-term maintainability.

27. match() now adds more entries to 3rd array arg:
        match("the big dog", /([a-z]+) ([a-z]+) ([a-z]+)/, data)
    fills in variables:
        data[1, "start"], data[1, "length"], and so on.

28. New asorti() function with same interface as asort(), but sorts indices
    instead of values.  

29. Documentation updated to FDL 1.2.

30. New `configure' option --disable-lint at compile time disables lint
    checking.  With GCC dead-code-elimination, cuts almost 200K off the
    executable size on GNU/Linux x86.  Presumably speeds up runtime.

31. Various minor cleanups, see the ChangeLog for details.