GNU CLISP 2.45 (2008-05-15) released

[Sam Steingold]

ANSI Common Lisp is a high-level, general-purpose programming language.
GNU CLISP is a Common Lisp implementation by Bruno Haible of Karlsruhe
University and Michael Stoll of Munich University, both in Germany.
It mostly supports the Lisp described in the ANSI Common Lisp standard.
It runs on most GNU and Unix systems (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
Solaris, Tru64, HP-UX, BeOS, NeXTstep, IRIX, AIX, Mac OS X and others) and on
other systems (Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista, Windows 95/98/ME) and needs only
4 MB of RAM.
It is Free Software and may be distributed under the terms of GNU GPL,
while it is possible to distribute commercial proprietary applications
compiled with GNU CLISP.
The user interface comes in English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch,
Russian and Danish, and can be changed at run time.
GNU CLISP includes an interpreter, a compiler, a debugger, CLOS, MOP,
a foreign language interface, a socket interface, i18n, fast bignums and more.
An X11 interface is available through CLX, Garnet, CLUE/CLIO.
GNU CLISP runs Maxima, ACL2 and many other Common Lisp packages.

More information at
  <http://clisp.cons.org/>,
  <http://www.clisp.org/>,
  <http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/> and
  <http://clisp.sourceforge.net/>.
Sources and selected binaries are available by anonymous ftp from
  <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/clisp/>
and its mirrors.


Important notes
---------------

* All .fas files generated by previous CLISP versions are invalid and
  must be recompiled.  This is because the Just-In-Time Compiled code is
  kept with the closures.
  Set CUSTOM:*LOAD-OBSOLETE-ACTION* to :COMPILE to automate this.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/system-dict.html#loadfile> for details.

User visible changes
--------------------

* The top-level configure option --build has been replaced by --cbc
  (Configure/Build/Check) to avoid conflict with the standard autoconf option.

* Experimental Just-In-Time Compilation of byte-compiled closures is now
  done using GNU lightning (this is a configure-time option).
  Thanks to Yann Dauphin <address@hidden>.

* New command-line option -lp adds directories to *LOAD-PATHS*.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/clisp.html#opt-load-paths> for details.

* New function FFI:OPEN-FOREIGN-LIBRARY allows pre-opening of shared libraries.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/dffi.html#dffi-open-lib> for details.

* New macro EXT:COMPILE-TIME-VALUE allows computing values at file compilation.
  See <http://clisp.podval.org/impnotes/macros3.html#compile-time-value>
  for details.

* New function FFI:FOREIGN-POINTER-INFO allows some introspection.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/dffi.html#fptr-info> for details.

* Versioned library symbols are now accessible via the :VERSION argument of
  DEF-CALL-OUT and DEF-C-VAR.
  Thanks to Kaz Kylheku <address@hidden>.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/dffi.html#def-call-out> for details.

* New functions GRAY:STREAM-READ-SEQUENCE and GRAY:STREAM-WRITE-SEQUENCE have
  been added for portability reasons.
  Suggested by Anton Vodonosov <address@hidden>.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/gray.html#st-rd-seq> for details.

* New user variable CUSTOM:*SUPPRESS-SIMILAR-CONSTANT-REDEFINITION-WARNING*
  controls whether the redefinition warning is issues when the new
  constant value is visually similar to the old one.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/defconstant.html#defconstant-similar>
  for details.

* REPL commands can now accept arguments.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/repl.html> for details.

* Updated the postgresql module to PostgreSQL 8.3.
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/postgresql.html> for details.

* Module syscalls now interfaces to <stdio.h> (for the sake of FFI modules).
  See <http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/syscalls.html#stdio> for details.
  There are others additions there also, but they are too numerous to
  be enumerated here.

* Bug fixes:
  + Fix handling of quoted objects by READ-PRESERVING-WHITESPACE. [ 1890854 ]
  + Fix rectangle count in NEW-CLX XLIB:SET-GCONTEXT-CLIP-MASK. [ 1918017 ]
  + Fix argument handling in NEW-CLX XLIB:QUERY-COLORS. [ 1931101 ]
  + Fix compilation on systems not supporting returning void. [ 1924506 ]
  + Fix TANH floating point overflow for large floats. [ 1683394 ]
  + Avoid extra aggressive bignum overflow reporting in READ. [ 1928735 ]
  + Improved floating point number formatting. [ 1790496, 1928759 ]
  + COMPILE no longer discards MACRO doc strings. [ 1936255 ]
  + Improved accuracy of LOG on complex numbers. [ 1934968 ]
  + Fix COERCE for compound float result-types. [ 1942246 ]
  + Fix $http_proxy parsing. [ 1959436 ]
  + Fix LISTEN on buffered streams when the last character was CRLF. [ 1961475 ]
  + Cross-compilation process has been restored to its former glory,
    thanks to the valiant and persistent testing by
    Vladimir Volovich <address@hidden>.
    [ 1928920, 1929496, 1929516, 1931097 ]

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux)
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