# $NetBSD: WHATSNEW,v 1.6 1995/02/27 13:28:25 cgd Exp $ # @(#)WHATSNEW 8.3 (Berkeley) 3/18/94 New in alpha3.4: The complex bug alluded to below has been fixed (in a slightly kludgey temporary way that may hurt efficiency a bit; this is another "get it out the door for 4.4" release). The tests at the end of the tests file have accordingly been uncommented. The primary sign of the bug was that something like a?b matching ab matched b rather than ab. (The bug was essentially specific to this exact situation, else it would have shown up earlier.) New in alpha3.3: The definition of word boundaries has been altered slightly, to more closely match the usual programming notion that "_" is an alphabetic. Stuff used for pre-ANSI systems is now in a subdir, and the makefile no longer alludes to it in mysterious ways. The makefile has generally been cleaned up some. Fixes have been made (again!) so that the regression test will run without -DREDEBUG, at the cost of weaker checking. A workaround for a bug in some folks' has been added. And some more things have been added to tests, including a couple right at the end which are commented out because the code currently flunks them (complex bug; fix coming). Plus the usual minor cleanup. New in alpha3.2: Assorted bits of cleanup and portability improvement (the development base is now a BSDI system using GCC instead of an ancient Sun system, and the newer compiler exposed some glitches). Fix for a serious bug that affected REs using many [] (including REG_ICASE REs because of the way they are implemented), *sometimes*, depending on memory-allocation patterns. The header-file prototypes no longer name the parameters, avoiding possible name conflicts. The possibility that some clot has defined CHAR_MIN as (say) `-128' instead of `(-128)' is now handled gracefully. "uchar" is no longer used as an internal type name (too many people have the same idea). Still the same old lousy performance, alas. New in alpha3.1: Basically nothing, this release is just a bookkeeping convenience. Stay tuned. New in alpha3.0: Performance is no better, alas, but some fixes have been made and some functionality has been added. (This is basically the "get it out the door in time for 4.4" release.) One bug fix: regfree() didn't free the main internal structure (how embarrassing). It is now possible to put NULs in either the RE or the target string, using (resp.) a new REG_PEND flag and the old REG_STARTEND flag. The REG_NOSPEC flag to regcomp() makes all characters ordinary, so you can match a literal string easily (this will become more useful when performance improves!). There are now primitives to match beginnings and ends of words, although the syntax is disgusting and so is the implementation. The REG_ATOI debugging interface has changed a bit. And there has been considerable internal cleanup of various kinds. New in alpha2.3: Split change list out of README, and moved flags notes into Makefile. Macro-ized the name of regex(7) in regex(3), since it has to change for 4.4BSD. Cleanup work in engine.c, and some new regression tests to catch tricky cases thereof. New in alpha2.2: Out-of-date manpages updated. Regerror() acquires two small extensions -- REG_ITOA and REG_ATOI -- which avoid debugging kludges in my own test program and might be useful to others for similar purposes. The regression test will now compile (and run) without REDEBUG. The BRE \$ bug is fixed. Most uses of "uchar" are gone; it's all chars now. Char/uchar parameters are now written int/unsigned, to avoid possible portability problems with unpromoted parameters. Some unsigned casts have been introduced to minimize portability problems with shifting into sign bits. New in alpha2.1: Lots of little stuff, cleanup and fixes. The one big thing is that regex.h is now generated, using mkh, rather than being supplied in the distribution; due to circularities in dependencies, you have to build regex.h explicitly by "make h". The two known bugs have been fixed (and the regression test now checks for them), as has a problem with assertions not being suppressed in the absence of REDEBUG. No performance work yet. New in alpha2: Backslash-anything is an ordinary character, not an error (except, of course, for the handful of backslashed metacharacters in BREs), which should reduce script breakage. The regression test checks *where* null strings are supposed to match, and has generally been tightened up somewhat. Small bug fixes in parameter passing (not harmful, but technically errors) and some other areas. Debugging invoked by defining REDEBUG rather than not defining NDEBUG. New in alpha+3: full prototyping for internal routines, using a little helper program, mkh, which extracts prototypes given in stylized comments. More minor cleanup. Buglet fix: it's CHAR_BIT, not CHAR_BITS. Simple pre-screening of input when a literal string is known to be part of the RE; this does wonders for performance. New in alpha+2: minor bits of cleanup. Notably, the number "32" for the word width isn't hardwired into regexec.c any more, the public header file prototypes the functions if __STDC__ is defined, and some small typos in the manpages have been fixed. New in alpha+1: improvements to the manual pages, and an important extension, the REG_STARTEND option to regexec().