slang 1.3.6 released

["John E. Davis" <davis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Version 1.3.6 of the slang library is now available from:

   ftp://space.mit.edu/pub/davis/

and the mirrors:

   ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/unix/misc/slang/
   ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/unix/news/slrn/
   ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/lang/slang/
   ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/slang/

For more information about the library and programs that utilize it,
visit the slang web site at http://www.s-lang.org.

Note that 1.3.x versions are development versions of the 1.4.x series.

Changes since 1.3.5 include:

43. Corrected the name of SLang_(sg)et_array_element to be consistent
    with the documentation.

44. Fixed a bug involving orelse and andelse statements when
    _debug_info is non-zero.

45. The _apropos intrinsic modified to work with namespaces.  In fact,
    it now returns an array of matches, or if called with out a
    namespace argument, it returns values to the stack for backward
    compatibility.

46. strchop and strchopr functions modified to return arrays. (this
    changes was actually made in 1.3.5).

47. Semantics of strcompress modified to be more useful.  The new
    semantics are probably more natural and should pose no
    compatibility problems.

48. The `*' operator may be used in array index expressions and is
    equivalent to `[:]', e.g., a[*,1] means all elements in column 1
    of the 2d array.

49. New intrinsics to convert bstrings <--> arrays:
  
        bstring_to_array
	array_to_bstring

50. New timing intrinsics: tic(); toc(); times ();  Also, unix_ctime
    renamed to ctime (This change occurred in 1.3.5).

51. strcat modified to accept more than 2 arguments:

       strcat ("a", "b", ..., "c") ==> "ab...c";

52. %S in format specifiers will convert the object to its string
    representation and use it as %s.

53. strtok defaults to using " \t\r\n\f" if called with one argument.

54. fgetslines takes optional second argument that specifies the
    number of lines to read.

55. If typeof(A) is IStruct_Type, and the corresponding C pointer is
    NULL, then pushing A will result in pushing NULL.  This allows A
    to be compared to NULL.

56. More optimization of arithmetic operations to improve speed.  My
    tests indicate that the resulting code involving arithmetic
    operations are about twice as fast as python (1.5) and about 20%
    faster than perl 5.

57. Patches from Andreas Kraft <kraft@xxxxxxxxxxxx> disabling the
    listdir intrinsic function if compiled with MSC.  Apparantly, the
    MSC compiler does not support posix functions such as opendir
    (although other vendors, e.g, Borland, have no problem with this).

58. `array_sort' intrinsic may be used without a comparison function.
    See docs.

59. Spelling errors in slang.tm corrected by Uichi Katsuta
    <katsuta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Thanks!).

60. Default install prefix changed from /usr to /usr/local

61. Changes made to SLtt/SLsmg code so that when a color definition is
    made via, e.g., SLtt_set_color, then the SLsmg interface will be
    get automatcally notified so that the next SLsmg_refresh will
    produce the correct colors.  In addition, SLsmg_touch_screen added.

62. It is now possible to evaluate S-Lang expressions with the
    S-Lang preprocessor e.g.,
      
        #ifeval (_slang_version > 9900) || (x == 1)

63. sl-feat.h: Patch from Jvrg Strohmayer <j_s@xxxxxx> to define
    _SLANG_MAP_VTXX_8BIT=1 for AMIGA.

64. New intrinsics: 
      strjoin.  This joins elements of a string array.
      localtime, gmtime

65. New SLsmg function: SLsmg_reinit_smg.  Instead of calling
    SLsmg_reset_smg followed immediately by SLsmg_init_smg when
    processing SIGWINCH signals, call SLsmg_init_smg instead.  This
    will allow SLsmg based code to properly redraw themselves when
    running in a SunOS cmdtool window by working around a bug in
    cmdtool.

-- 
John E. Davis                   Center for Space Research/AXAF Science Center
617-258-8119                    One Hampshire St., Building NE80-6019
http://space.mit.edu/~davis     Cambridge, MA  02139-4307