WHATSNEW 5.2 KB

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  1. New in alpha3.4: The complex bug alluded to below has been fixed (in a
  2. slightly kludgey temporary way that may hurt efficiency a bit; this is
  3. another "get it out the door for 4.4" release). The tests at the end of
  4. the tests file have accordingly been uncommented. The primary sign of
  5. the bug was that something like a?b matching ab matched b rather than ab.
  6. (The bug was essentially specific to this exact situation, else it would
  7. have shown up earlier.)
  8. New in alpha3.3: The definition of word boundaries has been altered
  9. slightly, to more closely match the usual programming notion that "_"
  10. is an alphabetic. Stuff used for pre-ANSI systems is now in a subdir,
  11. and the makefile no longer alludes to it in mysterious ways. The
  12. makefile has generally been cleaned up some. Fixes have been made
  13. (again!) so that the regression test will run without -DREDEBUG, at
  14. the cost of weaker checking. A workaround for a bug in some folks'
  15. <assert.h> has been added. And some more things have been added to
  16. tests, including a couple right at the end which are commented out
  17. because the code currently flunks them (complex bug; fix coming).
  18. Plus the usual minor cleanup.
  19. New in alpha3.2: Assorted bits of cleanup and portability improvement
  20. (the development base is now a BSDI system using GCC instead of an ancient
  21. Sun system, and the newer compiler exposed some glitches). Fix for a
  22. serious bug that affected REs using many [] (including REG_ICASE REs
  23. because of the way they are implemented), *sometimes*, depending on
  24. memory-allocation patterns. The header-file prototypes no longer name
  25. the parameters, avoiding possible name conflicts. The possibility that
  26. some clot has defined CHAR_MIN as (say) `-128' instead of `(-128)' is
  27. now handled gracefully. "uchar" is no longer used as an internal type
  28. name (too many people have the same idea). Still the same old lousy
  29. performance, alas.
  30. New in alpha3.1: Basically nothing, this release is just a bookkeeping
  31. convenience. Stay tuned.
  32. New in alpha3.0: Performance is no better, alas, but some fixes have been
  33. made and some functionality has been added. (This is basically the "get
  34. it out the door in time for 4.4" release.) One bug fix: regfree() didn't
  35. free the main internal structure (how embarrassing). It is now possible
  36. to put NULs in either the RE or the target string, using (resp.) a new
  37. REG_PEND flag and the old REG_STARTEND flag. The REG_NOSPEC flag to
  38. regcomp() makes all characters ordinary, so you can match a literal
  39. string easily (this will become more useful when performance improves!).
  40. There are now primitives to match beginnings and ends of words, although
  41. the syntax is disgusting and so is the implementation. The REG_ATOI
  42. debugging interface has changed a bit. And there has been considerable
  43. internal cleanup of various kinds.
  44. New in alpha2.3: Split change list out of README, and moved flags notes
  45. into Makefile. Macro-ized the name of regex(7) in regex(3), since it has
  46. to change for 4.4BSD. Cleanup work in engine.c, and some new regression
  47. tests to catch tricky cases thereof.
  48. New in alpha2.2: Out-of-date manpages updated. Regerror() acquires two
  49. small extensions -- REG_ITOA and REG_ATOI -- which avoid debugging kludges
  50. in my own test program and might be useful to others for similar purposes.
  51. The regression test will now compile (and run) without REDEBUG. The
  52. BRE \$ bug is fixed. Most uses of "uchar" are gone; it's all chars now.
  53. Char/uchar parameters are now written int/unsigned, to avoid possible
  54. portability problems with unpromoted parameters. Some unsigned casts have
  55. been introduced to minimize portability problems with shifting into sign
  56. bits.
  57. New in alpha2.1: Lots of little stuff, cleanup and fixes. The one big
  58. thing is that regex.h is now generated, using mkh, rather than being
  59. supplied in the distribution; due to circularities in dependencies,
  60. you have to build regex.h explicitly by "make h". The two known bugs
  61. have been fixed (and the regression test now checks for them), as has a
  62. problem with assertions not being suppressed in the absence of REDEBUG.
  63. No performance work yet.
  64. New in alpha2: Backslash-anything is an ordinary character, not an
  65. error (except, of course, for the handful of backslashed metacharacters
  66. in BREs), which should reduce script breakage. The regression test
  67. checks *where* null strings are supposed to match, and has generally
  68. been tightened up somewhat. Small bug fixes in parameter passing (not
  69. harmful, but technically errors) and some other areas. Debugging
  70. invoked by defining REDEBUG rather than not defining NDEBUG.
  71. New in alpha+3: full prototyping for internal routines, using a little
  72. helper program, mkh, which extracts prototypes given in stylized comments.
  73. More minor cleanup. Buglet fix: it's CHAR_BIT, not CHAR_BITS. Simple
  74. pre-screening of input when a literal string is known to be part of the
  75. RE; this does wonders for performance.
  76. New in alpha+2: minor bits of cleanup. Notably, the number "32" for the
  77. word width isn't hardwired into regexec.c any more, the public header
  78. file prototypes the functions if __STDC__ is defined, and some small typos
  79. in the manpages have been fixed.
  80. New in alpha+1: improvements to the manual pages, and an important
  81. extension, the REG_STARTEND option to regexec().