Beta version of patch 7 to gawk 3.1 now available

[Aharon Robbins]

This note is to announce the first BETA release of patch 7 to version
3.1 of gawk.

It is available from:

        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk-3.1.6g.tar.gz

Overall, this release fixes a number of bugs, as well as offering upgrades
to various infrastructure technologies, such as automake, autoconf, and
so on.  The list of changes from the NEWS file is appended, below.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.

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 3.1.6 to 3.1.7
---------------------------
1. Gawk now has support for z/OS (IBM S/390 architecture).

2. Gawk now handles multibyte strings better in [s]printf with field
   widths and such.

3. Gawk now uses libsigsegv to print a message before core dumping. This
   handles infinite recursion of an awk function a little better.
   Use of the library can be disabled at configure time with the
   --disable-libsigsegv option for unusual systems.

4. The handling of BINMODE is now somewhat more sane.

5. A getline from a directory is no longer fatal; instead it returns -1.

6. Per POSIX, special variable names (like FS) cannot be used as function
   parameter names.

7. The new -O / --optimize option enables simple constant folding on
   the parse tree during parsing.  We hope that with time the number
   of optimizations will increase.

8. Updated to the latest autotools: Autoconf 2.63, Automake 1.11,
   Libtool 2.2.6a, and Gettext 0.17.

9. Some improvement in testing for isinf / isnan in builtin.c.

10. Improved the handling of `a = a b c' to be more general.

11. Lots of bugs fixed, see the ChangeLog for the details.