Release Notes for Allegro CL 8.1
This document contains the following sections:
1.0 Introduction
2.0 Information on changes and new stuff since the 8.1 release
3.0 Fasl files are not-compatible between versions and operating systems
3.1 All pre-8.1 Lisp compiled files must be recompiled (old fasl files will not load)
3.2 Fasl files may be incompatible in different Lisps on same hardware
4.0 Release Notes for installation
5.0 Release notes for specific platforms
5.1 OS patch needed for Solaris 2.8 on Sparcs
5.2 HP Alpha running Tru64: default stack size should be increased
5.3 Notes of increasing the default maximum stack size on HP-UX 11 machines
5.4 Mac OS X notes
5.5 AIX notes
5.6 Heap start locations
6.0 Release Notes for the base Lisp
6.1 New features in the base Lisp
6.1.1 Features added to Allegro CL 8.0 after the initial release of Allegro CL 8.0
6.1.2 New features in Allegro CL 8.1
6.2 Non-backward-compatible changes in the base Lisp
6.3 Other changes to and notes about the base Lisp
6.4 Base Lisp platform-specific information
7.0 Release Notes for CLIM
8.0 Release Notes for Common Graphics and the IDE
8.1 Significant changes in Common Graphics
8.2 Non-backward-compatible changes in Common Graphics
8.3 Other changes in Common Graphics
8.3.1 Grid-widget-specific changes
8.4 IDE release notes
8.4.1 Opening projects from releases prior to 8.1
8.5 Functionality to handle differences between Windows and GTK
8.6 Release notes for the winapi module
9.0 Release notes for AllegroServe
10.0 Release notes for The Emacs/Lisp interface
11.0 Availability of CLX for Allegro CL
12.0 Release notes for Orblink
Appendix A. ANSI Conformance in Allegro CL
This document is a copy of the version 8.1 release notes taken at a
time prior to the release of version 8.2. Subsequent changes are not
tracked. The actual current 8.1 release notes are available
at www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.1/doc/release-notes.htm. This
document is included in the 8.2 documentation to allow users who
happen not to have access to the internet to see changes from 8.0 to
8.1 which may affect them but which are not otherwise discussed in the
8.2 documentation.
Many
sections are divided into non-backward-compatible changes (that
produce different behavior in release 8.1
compared to release 8.0) and changes
unrelated to backward-compatibility. Note that a bug fix is not
considered a backward-incompatible change even if it does result in
changed behavior because the previous behavior was erroneous.
This document describes the changes, major and minor, from 8.0 to
8.1. Please look particularly at these sections:
If you notice changed or unexpected behavior with an operator,
variable, class, or facility, search for its name in this document to
see whether there is an entry concerning it.
There are regular documentation updates. The updated documentation is
available on our website (www.franz.com/support/documentation/,
where you will find links to the 8.1 documentation (and links to the
documentation for earlier releases) and links that allow you to
download the updated docs.
Other post-8.1 releases changes include the following:
-
New plot widget for drawing X/Y graphs (such as scatter
graphs). An analog of the existing
chart-widget
, the new plot-widget
allows drawing X/Y plots of
various types. The plot-widget
page has several examples. There are
new functions and many chart-widget
operators and classes have been
modified to encompass the new plot functionality. (The biggest change
is where methods are defined, with methods previously defined on a
class now being inherited from a superclass.)
Existing chart-widget
code
should work without change. The plot-widget was added in an update
released in the Fall of 2008 but the documentation was only added in
early 2009.
-
New interface to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API: this
allows accessing EC2 directly from Lisp. See the new
document ec2.htm for more information. An update
released in mid-December, 2008, contains the new software.
-
Enhancements to IDE projects allows easier handling of
subprojects: various enhancements to projects (see
Notes
on a project enhancements in the 8.1 cgide.htm (link
requires internet access). These modification were provided in an
update released in the late Fall, 2008.
-
Enhancements to the mail functions send-smtp, send-smtp-auth and
send-letter to support SSL and STARTTLS. The mail
functions send-smtp, send-smtp-auth,
and send-letter
have all been been enhanced to allow for ssl connections and STARTTLS
negotiation ('TLS' stands for Transport Layer Security and is another
name for SSL.) The enhancement is implemented by allowing information
to be included in the value of
the mail-server. See the (linked) function
descriptions for details. The update with this new functionality was
released in Spetember, 2008.
-
Changes to SSL interface allows using more methods and using
ciphers. The methods keyword argument
to make-ssl-client-stream and
make-ssl-server-stream
now accepts more options allowing more control over which SSL protocol
is used. A new ciphers keyword argument allows using a cipher. This
change was made in an update released in mid-2008.
-
Enhanced update.exe on Windows now also downloads
updates. update.exe is the program on Windows that rebuilds
images when you have obtained updates using sys:update-allegro (or
the Download
Patches dialog). update.exe has been enhanced to
accept arguments: -u, -p, and -P. When -u
is passed, updates will be downloaded and new images built if
necessary. -p and -P specify how
sys:update-allegro (which
is called when -u is specified) will deal with proxies. See the
description of sys:update-allegro for details. For the
Allegro CL 8.1 Express edition on Windows only, there is a
new Rebuild images (download new updates first) menu item on
the Start | Programs | Allegro CL 8.1 Express menu which calls
update.exe with the -u option.
-
New version of Allegro CL Express gets license file
automatically. The installation process for Windows has
automatically obtained the license file for some time. Now, new
procedures for installation on the various UNIX-like platform
including Mac OS X do so as well. There is also a small change to the
Windows procedure, with the name of the self-extracting executable
changed to acl81_express.exe. The Express Edition is fully
described on the Franz Inc. web site
(www.franz.com, click on
the Download button to see information about Express software).
-
New unix-shared-library examples and documentation. The
description of how to make a Lisp application a shared library on
Unix-style platforms is now applicable to all such
platforms. See unix-shared-library.htm.
-
New util-string module and util.string:string+ function. The
module was released in an update in early February, 2008. The module
is designed to provide string utility functions that are more
efficient or more convenient that Common Lisp string functions. The
first new function is string+. It acts like
(concatenate 'string ...)
but accepts any objects
as arguments (stringifying them with princ-to-string) and like
(format nil "..." ...)
but is faster, particularly
for short strings and certain common object types, and easier to
use. See string-utilities.htm.
-
New operating system interface function excl.osi:mkdtemp creates a
uniquely named temporary directory. This new function does not
work on Windows, Solaris, or HP-UX. excl.osi:mkdtemp takes a string
ending in six X's (like "/tmp/mydirXXXXXX") as its argument. It
replaces the six X's with characters that result in a new directory
name, creates the directory, and returns the new name (a string). This
function was added in an update released in mid January.
-
New compact keyword argument to
net.mail:extract-email-addresses.
extract-email-addresses now accepts
a compact keyword argument, which, when specified
true, causes the results to be returned as a list
of
user@domain
strings.
-
excl.shell:rm has a new no-execute keyword argument. Like the
no-execute argument to other shell functions,
when specified true, information about what would be done is printed
but no further action is taken. See rm and
shell-module.htm. This change is made in a patch
released in early October, 2007.
-
defun-foreign-callable now accepts a returning
declaration. defun-foreign-callable accepts "declarations"
which provide information about the foreign-callable Lisp function. A
:returning
declaration is now accepted. Its value
can be a foreign type. The :returning
declaration
replaces the convert-to-c-types argument in
register-foreign-callable when
it is used. Note this feature was included as a patch in release 8.0
but not documented. Nor was the documentation included in the 8.1
documentation as released. No patch is necessary for 8.1.
-
md5-file has a return keyword argument. The documentation
for md5-file did not
describe it but has been corrected.
fasl files (compiled Lisp files) created by
releases of Allegro CL prior to 8.1
will not load into Allegro CL 8.1. All such files must be recreated by
compiling the associated Lisp source files. An error will be signaled
if Lisp attempts to load an older, incompatible
fasl file.
8.1.beta fasl file will load into 8.1 final. There is no need to
recompile 8.1.beta compiled files.
Fasl files created on Windows x86 cannot be loaded into Linux or
FreeBSD x86 Lisps
The Windows and UNIX operating systems are too different. However,
FASL files (for the same Lisp version) can generally be shared between
different UNIX operating systems on the same hardware. The general
principles are as follows. Note that incompatibility may creep in for
reasons outside our control. If fasl files are incompatible, recompile
on the target machine.
Fasl files will usually be compatible between platforms when:
-
the architecture (hardware) is the same
-
the calling convention is the same (that is, the method of calling
functions and the registers they use for arguments are the same)
-
the method for generating signals can be made compatible (this cannot
be done for Windows and UNIX, so they are incompatible for this
reason)
It is up to the user to ensure that there are no os-specific
dependencies, or that features (i.e. #+/#- ) did not cause
essential code to be excluded or extraneous code introduced
that would cause a problem on the crossed architecture.
-
Except for Mac OS X, version 8.1 uses the 8.0 installation
procedure: installation is described in
installation.htm. Mac OS X installation is
described in the section Installation on Mac OS X in
installation.htm.
-
The distribution includes 8 bit and 16 bit character images
(this information is repeated from earlier Release Notes). Allegro CL
has images that support 8 bit characters only, or 16 bit
characters only. It is our expectation that most users will use the 16
bit images. Executables supplied with the distribution either have or
do not have `8' in the name. Those with 8 in the name (mlisp8 and
alisp8, e.g.) support 8 bit characters. Those without a number in the
name support 16 bit characters. Image (dxl) files also come in 8 and
16 varieties. Again, 8 in the name means 8 bit character
support. Character support for images and executables must
match. Trying to start an executable with the wrong type of image
fails.
-
No prebuilt Allegro Composer images in the distribution
(this information is repeated from earlier Release Notes). To
create an Allegro Composer image, start Allegro CL and load
buildcomposer.cl. That will produce composer and
composer.dxl, or composer8 and
composer8.dxl. Allegro Composer is available on Unix only.
-
No prebuilt Allegro CLIM images in the distribution (this
information is repeated from earlier Release Notes). To create a CLIM
image, start Allegro CL and load buildclim.cl. That will
produce clim and clim.dxl, or clim8 and
clim8.dxl.
Allegro CL 8.1 is known to work with the following minimal operating
system versions. Allegro CL 8.1 runs on all operating system versions
released (not in beta or pre-release form) April 1, 2007. See
below for places to obtain information on operating systems released
after that date.
Note that Allegro CL 8.1 does not run on Windows 98/Me or on Mac OS
X 10.3.
32-bit platforms
-
Apple Mac OS X (Intel) 10.4
-
Apple Mac OS X 10.4
-
FreeBSD 6.x
-
HP Tru64 UNIX 5.1
-
HP-UX 11.00
-
IBM AIX 5.1
-
Linux (x86), glibc 2.3
-
Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Server 2003
-
Sun Solaris (SPARC) 2.9
64-bit platforms
-
64-bit Apple Mac OS X 10.4
-
64-bit HP Tru64 UNIX 5.1
-
64-bit HP-UX 11.00
-
64-bit IBM AIX 5.1
-
64-bit Linux (x86-64), glibc 2.4
-
64-bit Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/Server 2003
-
64-bit Sun Solaris (SPARC) 2.9
-
64-bit Sun Solaris (x86-64) 2.10
Franz Inc. cannot maintain the same release schedule as the many
operating system providers on the many platforms we support. Usually
Allegro Common Lisp and all of its component parts will work on new
Operating System versions that become available after release. But
sometimes Allegro CL patches or operating-system patches, or
installation tweaks, will be required before Lisp will run on an
updated system.
Franz Inc. usually finds out about any such issues soon after new
operating system releases appear and devises any necessary patches or
compatibility procedures. We maintain current information about
operating system versions on this web page: https://franz.com/support/osinfo.lhtml. We strongly advise you to check that page before
updating your operating system. If we know that the new operating
system is compatible, or is compatible with certain patches, you will
find the information there. Similarly if it is known to be
incompatible. If the new operating system is not yet listed it may be
that it has not yet been tested.
A problem with Solaris 2.8 where calls to run-shell-command can cause Lisp to hang is
fixed by operating system patch 108993-18 (which supersedes the
earlier patch 108827-36 for this problem). On Solaris 8, it can
also be fixed by adding /usr/lib/lwp to the front of your
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
environment variable. No fix is
necessary for Solaris 2.9.
The patch can be obtained from this Sun website: http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-49843-1.
The default stack size limit on an Alpha is 2 Megabytes, which is too
low for
normal stack overflow handling. Doing
limit stacksize unlimited
in a csh shell seems to allow up to 16 or 32 Mb, and users can
run that command before running Allegro CL. (That command
could be put into a .cshrc file.)
However, that only solves the problem for Allegro CL processes that
are started from within that shell. You can also change the default
for the machine as a whole by doing something like the
following. (This procedure is provided as an example of what might
work. Please check your Tru64 system documentation or contact your
HP service representative for the precise instructions.)
The procedure described here is best performed by a system
administrator or similarly trained person. The
vmunix file created and copied at the end is the
UNIX kernel. Modifying it incorrectly or corrupting it can have
serious consequences.
1. Log in as root. You must be root (or have superuser privileges)
to perform most of the following operations.
2. Change into the /sys/conf/ directory.
prompt# cd /sys/conf
3. Edit the file whose name is the machine name, which we will call
MACHINE_NAME, as follows. (Such a file
typically exists after normal Tru64 Unix install. If the file does not
exist, the System Administrator will have to create one.
Change the line
dfssiz 2097152
to
dflssiz 8388608
or
dflssiz 16777216
The value of dflssiz may already be different than 2097152,
which is 2 megabytes -- (* 2 (expt 2 20)). The new suggested values are
8388608, which is 8 megabytes and a good value for 32-bit
Lisps, or 16777216, 16 megabytes and a good value for 64-bit
Lisps.
4. Run /usr/sbin/doconfig as follows (recall that
MACHINE_NAME is the file in
/sys/conf whose name is the machine name):
prompt# /usr/sbin/doconfig -c MACHINE_NAME
You should see output similar to:
*** KERNEL CONFIGURATION AND BUILD PROCEDURE ***
Saving /sys/conf/MACHINE_NAME as /sys/conf/MACHINE_NAME.bck
Do you want to edit the configuration file? (y/n) [n]: n
*** PERFORMING KERNEL BUILD ***
Working....Thu Oct 4 09:58:16 PDT 2001
The new kernel is /sys/MACHINE_NAME/vmunix
5. Copy the new kernel to / with a command like the following
prompt# mv /sys/MACHINE_NAME/vmunix /
6. Reboot the system.
Increasing the default maximum stack size on HPUX 11 requires
modifying kernel configuration parameters, then rebuilding the kernel.
This process should be done by the systems administrator.
The file /stand/system is the kernel
configuration file. The maxssiz
and
maxssiz_64bit
tunable parameters need to be
increased to at least 32MB each. If you don't have any references to
maxssiz
or maxssiz_64bit
in your
/stand/system file, then you can simply add these
lines to the bottom of the file:
maxssiz (32*1024*1024)
maxssiz_64bit (32*1024*1024)
Otherwise, you'll need to modify the existing parameters so that they
express a value >= 32MB.
After modifying /stand/system, the kernel needs
to be rebuilt using the following command:
/usr/sbin/config -u /stand/system
The system will have to be rebooted for the changes to take effect.
Allegro CL 8.1 is only supported on Mac OS X version 10.4 or later.
It is not supported on versions 10.3 or
earlier.
The Runtime Analyzer (see runtime-analyzer.htm)
does not work properly on the 64-bit Mac OS X port (there is no
problem on the 32-bit port).
Building shared libraries on Mac OS X
Building
shared libraries on Mac OS X in
foreign-functions.htm describes how to create a
shared library suitable for loading into Allegro CL. We have
determined that the -flat_namespace
to the
ld used to create the shared library is necessary, as shown in
the linked section.
In order for Allegro CL 8.1 to run on AIX the following filesets must
be installed:
-
bos.perf.perfstat
-
bos.perf.libperfstat
These filesets should be available on the AIX installation media.
Without these filesets, Lisp will likely fail on startup. The exact
nature of the failure depends of the specific dlopen()
implementation. A typical failure message looks like:
dlopen(/usr/local/allegro/acl81/libacli8110.so, mode) error: Bad address
When building large new images, it is often useful to specify Lisp
Heap and C-heap start locations. See the discussion of the
lisp-heap-start and
c-heap-start keyword arguments in Arguments to
build-lisp-image 2: defaults not inherited from the running
image in building-images.htm. Here are
the initial locations (called `bases') in Allegro CL 8.1 as delivered.
Values are Hexadecimal integers.
Operating System |
Lisp base |
C base |
Tru64 32-bit |
0x30000000 |
0x54000000 |
Tru64 64-bit |
0x1000000000 |
0x2000000000 |
FreeBSD |
0x40000000 |
0xa0000000 |
HP-UX 32-bit |
0x10000000 |
0x64000000 |
HP-UX 64-bit |
0x8000001000000000 |
0x8000002000000000 |
Linux (x86) |
0x71000000 |
0xa0000000 |
Linux (AMD64) 64-bit |
0x1000000000 |
0x2000000000 |
Mac OS X 32-bit |
0x10000000 |
0x64000000 |
Mac OS X 64-bit |
0x1000000000 |
0x2000000000 |
Windows |
0x20000000 |
0x54000000 |
AIX 32-bit |
0x30000000 |
0x64000000 |
AIX 64-bit |
0x700001000000000 |
0x700002000000000 |
Solaris 32-bit |
0x4000000 |
0x54000000 |
Solaris 64-bit |
0x1000000000 |
0x10000000000 |
Solaris (AMD64) 64-bit |
0x1000000000 |
0x10000000000 |
This main section contains three subsections (which have additional
subsections): one on new features
(Section 6.1 New features in the base Lisp), one on changes which are not
backwards compatible and so may require code changes,
(Section 6.2 Non-backward-compatible changes in the base Lisp), and one on
miscellaneous changes (Section 6.3 Other changes to and notes about the base Lisp).
We have added a number of new capabilities to Allegro CL. Here we give
links to the documentation of the new features.
The features described in
Section 6.1.1 Features added to Allegro CL 8.0 after the initial release of Allegro CL 8.0 were released
originally as patches to Allegro CL 8.0, but after the initial release
of Allegro CL 8.0. The features described in
Section 6.1.2 New features in Allegro CL 8.1 are new in the Allegro CL
8.1 release.
Various additions to Allegro CL 8.0 were added after the original
release of Allegro CL 8.0. We list them here. All are part of release
8.1.
-
New features in SSL socket support. Allegro CL has for some
time supported SSL (Secure Socket Layer) sockets. See the section
Secure Socket Layer
(SSL) in socket.htm. This facility is
enhanced to support processing of certificates. The
argument lists to make-ssl-client-stream and make-ssl-server-stream have
been augmented to support the new feature. New methods, get-ssl-peer-certificate,
get-ssl-verify-result,
and ssl-do-handshake
have been added. get-ssl-peer-certificate allows
accessing and working with X.509 certificates. A new
x509-certificate
class
defines objects corresponding to X.509 certificates.
-
TCP MD5 Signature Option support (Linux platforms only). The
new function set-tcp-md5-sig provides an interface to
the TCP_MD5SIG (RFC2385) socket option. It sets the key to be used
for TCP connections from an address. make-socket has been modified to accept
new keyword arguments tcp-md5-sig-key and
tcp-md5-sig-key-ef.
-
Daylight saving time changes. Allegro CL finds out whether
daylight ssaving time is or is not in effect by asking the operating
system. The variable
*daylight-saving-time-observed*
is now
ignored. (However, some operating systems have not been updated to
reflect the new United States DST schedules which go into effect in
2007 (with DST starting on March 11, 2007). Allegro CL schedules have
been updated. You can use the old system with the updated schedules if
you set the unexported variable
excl::*use-us-daylight-saving-time*
to
true. Then the variable *daylight-saving-time-observed*
will have
effect. But when your OS is updated to have correct DST information,
you should use that.)
-
New rpc update. The changes included adding a
kill argument to client-exit, modifying client-exit to kill a process on a remote
host, and revising symbol handling in remote references. The
documentation was also updated, with significant changes particularly
to the description of run-other-client. See
rpc.htm for information on RPC in Allegro CL.
-
New :anynl value for eol-convention for input-streams. The
function eol-convention
returns and (with setf) allows
setting the End of Line convention used by a stream. You may now set
the value to
:anynl
, which will result
in any standard end of
line convention being read correctly on input (the UNIX convention of
a linefeed, the DOS convention of a carriage-return linefeed, or the
Mac convention of a carriage-return). See the description of eol-convention for details and a
discussion of what is done for output files.
-
Variable net.uri:*strict-parse* allows parsing of some URIs that
are non-compliant. RFC2396 specifies the format for URIs but many
websites do not strictly follow its rules. The variable
*strict-parse*
controls how
strictly the parser observes syntax rules and, when nil
, allows parsing of many URIs which are actually
non-compliant. See uri.htm for details of URI
support.
-
New net.mail package and interface for parsing and validating email
addresses. The module now provides two functions in the new
net.mail package: parse-email-address and valid-email-domain-p. The first (broadly
following RFC2822)
extracts the username and domain name from an email address while the
second tries to validate domain names (because many things can go
wrong with email, valid-email-domain-p is most useful when
it says a domain is invalid). See The net.mail interface for parsing and validating
email addresses in imap.htm for details.
-
excl:with-underlying-simple-vector exported: the macro excl:with-underlying-simple-vector,
which allows access to the underlying data vector associated with an
array, is now exported and documented. (It has existed as an internal
operator for a long time in Allegro CL.)
-
New ISO 8601 date/time module: support for ISO 8601
specifications of dates and times has been added to Allegro CL. See
date-time.htm for details. The functions locale-format-time and locale-print-time have also been
modified to accept date-time objects as well as universal times as
arguments. (The description of locale-print-time has been updated to reflect
that change and also to revise the field descriptor definitions
(%F, %G, %g, and %P added, %U, %W removed) and the Modified Conversion
Specifications (%OU and %OW removed), the removed
definitions/specs were never in fact supported.)
-
New module provides PAM support on some platforms. The
pam module provides a Lisp wrapper around the PAM API on Linux,
Solaris, and some other unixlike operating systems. PAM (Pluggable
Authentication Modules) is described in www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/FAQ. See
PAM support in Allegro
Common Lisp in miscellaneous.htm for
details. PAM is not supported on Windows and some UNIX
platforms. The PAM
documentation lists the platforms where PAM is not
supported.
-
New FAQ replaces old FAQ. We have a new FAQ (Frequently
Asked Questions) document. It is only available online (so
you will always see the latest version). It is located at https://franz.com/support/faq/. The
version of our FAQ previously included with the documentation in the
doc/faq/ directory has been discontinued and removed (all files
now simply contain a link to the new FAQ).
-
New Emacs-Lisp-Interface command fi:insert-arglist (C-c i): the
fi:insert-arglist command, when invoked after typing
'(<fun> ', inserts the argument list template into the code
being typed. See Argument
lists in eli.htm for details.
Also, a problem with using Gnu Emacs on Windows compiled with Cygwin
has been fixed.
-
New optimized variants of read-line. Two new functions, simple-stream-read-line and read-line-into were added to provide
optimized variants of read-line, with little or no consing and less
copying of characters (because the target strings are provided in the
function call). simple-stream-read-line allows (optionally)
specifying a target string but will create a new string if
necessary. read-line-into
always requires a target string and will use it regardless. It is
therefore always more efficient but it does require correct
bookkeeeping to be used correctly. Both are documented on their own
pages. The read-line-into
page has numerous examples.
-
double-sided option for pop-up-printer-job-dialog. A new
option, double-sided, has been
added for printer support. See pop-up-printer-job-dialog.
-
Minor IP address handling upgrade. The function dotted-address-p returns true if
its argument is a string in dotted IP address form. See Host naming in
socket.htm where the dotted form is described with
examples.
-
sys:update-allegro now allows specifying proxy username and
password. There has long been a proxy keyword
argument to sys:update-allegro, the function that
downloads updates and patches for Allegro CL. This argument allows
downloading when using a proxy. However, sometimes the proxy also
needs a username and password. A new keyword argument,
proxy-basic-authorization, allows these to be
specified as well. See sys:update-allegro.
-
ntservice facility provided: you can make your application a
service on Windows. See Turning your application into a Windows
Service in delivery.htm. There is an
example (after the update is complete) in examples/ntservice/.
-
jLinker revisions. There are changes in
jlinker-listen
(new :abort value for the stop argument); jlinker-init (new
report keyword argument); def-java-class (new possible
value for the name); def-java-constructor
(documentation clarification); jlinker-slot (new value for the
key argument); and a new variable
*jlinker-deprecated-warnings*
. (Also
minor changes in jarray-set, jdo-call, jmake-new, jcons, jmeth, jget-cons, jget-meth, and jarray-set.)
Additionally, jlinker-init now has an
end-function keyword argument which, if supplied,
should name a function that will be called when jLinker stops. jlinker-listen now
behaves differently when jlinker-init fails: before
jlinker-listen
would exit when jlinker-init failed. Now, the
function specified as the value of the
process-function is called and it is its
responsibility to decide whether to stop or continue when jlinker-init returns a
failure message.
-
RPC changes. There are some
some modifications to the rpc module (see rpc.htm
for a description of the module). The affected operators were client-end-all (new
optional arguments) and run-other-client (new
line-limit keyword argument). Also, there were
significant documentation changes to run-other-lisp and rpc-close.
-
New command-line argument +P. If +p (lowercase p)
appears on the command line, +P (uppercase P) undoes its effect. (+p
may be present in the command-line resource for the executable. +P
allows cancelling the +p in such a case.) See Command line
arguments in startup.htm for a list of
command-line arguments accepted by Allegro CL.
-
New support for constructing MIME messages. See MIME support in
imap.htm for more information. See particularly the
new function make-mime-part. send-letter,
send-smtp, and send-smtp-auth have been enhanced
to allow files or streams (as well as a string) as the value of the
message argument. send-letter also now accepts an
attachments keyword argument.
-
Changes to mail functions allows specifying the mail server port
number. Changes to the handling of the
mail-server argument to send-smtp, send-smtp-auth, and send-letter allows you to
specify the mail server port number. Prior to this change, port 25 was
always used. See the function descriptions for details.
-
New support for pipe streams: See make-pipe-stream, make-function-input-stream, and with-function-input-stream. (The new
pipe streams are somewhat more flexible than the one provided by
pipe.)
-
New function base64-encode-stream. See the description of
base64-encode-stream and see
Base64
Support in miscellaneous.htm for
information on Base64 and Base64 support in Allegro CL. Also, base64-decode-stream now accepts
keyword arguments which can control the error behavior and the number
of bytes read.
-
New ability to invoke Lisp within a bat file on Windows. You
can now execute Lisp programs contained within a bat file on Windows
so the bat file will invoke Lisp, run specified forms, and then exit
(optionally pausing before exiting). The function lisp-to-bat-file supports this new
facility. It writes an appropriate bat file when given a Lisp file of
forms to execute and provided some additonal information (such as what
image file to use). Also added are two new command-line arguments
--bat and --bat-pause. (See Command line arguments in
startup.htm for a list of command-line arguments
accepted by Allegro CL.) This Tech
Corner entry talks about the bat file feature and gives an
example.
-
New Oracle-direct interface function cancel-cursor. The
function cancel-cursor allows you to
cancel retreiving values via a cursor before you're read all the
values.
-
update.exe replaces update.bat for updating images on
Windows. This was done in a 8.0 patch but not previously
documented. You run update.exe (rather than update.bat)
to create new images with patches included after downloading patches
with sys:update-allegro or
with the Download
Patches dialog.
-
Support for gdb/dbx/windbg debuggers. Support for using these
debuggers (on appropriate platforms) has been added on some
platforms. See gdb
(or dbx or windbg) interface in
debugging.htm for details. That section has a list
of supported platforms.
-
New Iref8 compiler explanation: provides an explanation that an
argument to svref or ssvref is apparently of the wrong type. A
compiler warning is also issued, but this explanation during
compilation may be helpful. Compiler explanations are described in
compiler-explanations.htm. Iref explanations are
described in the section ;Iref labels in that document.
-
concatenate-system now returns a list of filenames. The
function concatenate-system, part of the
defsystem utility (see defsystem.htm) previously
returned t. It now returns a list of namestrings of the files
concatenated, in the order in which they appear in the concatenated
fasl file.
-
make-foreign-pointer has new aligned keyword argument. If the
aligned keyword argument to make-foreign-pointer is specified true, then the
address is interpreted as an aligned address and is shifted to become
a machine integer before storing. (Aligned pointers are described in
Aligned
Pointers in ftype.htm.)
-
Apparent misspelling in declarations now cause warnings. Consider this code:
(defun foo (x1 y1) (declare (fixnum x2 y1)) (+ x1 y1))
The variable x2
is declared to be a fixnum, but is
not actually lexically visible. Presumably the author meant to declare
x1
to be a fixnum and just mistyped. This error
will make no difference to the code execution, though it might make a
difference to how the code is compiled. Allegro CL will now warn about
the unknown variable in the declaration. Note that this code will
(likely) cause two warnings
(defun bar () (declare (fixnum y1)) (+ 1 y1))
Here y1
will be assumed to be special and (if
y1
is otherwise not known about) a warning saying
that y1
is assumed special will be signaled as will
the warning that a declaration refers to an unknown variable.
See Warnings are
signaled for misspelling in type declarations in
compiling.htm.
-
Semaphores implemented for gates. The functions get-semaphore and put-semaphore can be applied to gates to control
when a gate is opened or closed and by which process. Gates are
described in Gates in
multiprocessing.htm.
-
Registered addresses of Lisp functions (for foreign callbacks) now
never move. When you want a Lisp function called from a foreign
function, you have to register it with register-foreign-callable (and
define it with defun-foreign-callable). register-foreign-callable returns
the address of the Lisp wrapper function which is what is actually
called from the foreign code. In earlier releases, this address was
valid after a gc but was not valid after a dumplisp. Starting in release 8.1, it is
always valid. register-foreign-callable also
returns an index into a table that can be used to find the address. In
earlier releases, we instructed users to use the index to avoid having
an invalid address after a dumplisp. That is no longer necessary but
using an index does have the advantage that it is always a fixnum
while the address may be a bignum.
-
with-auto-zoom-and-exit and zoom function now defined in
Lisp. There is a new top-level.debug package and autozoom module
with two operators: the macro with-auto-zoom-and-exit and the
function zoom. In earlier releases,
with-auto-zoom-and-exit was defined in a source file but was
not part of Lisp as delivered. These functions allow you to get
debugging information programmatically. See Getting a
backtrace programmatically in
debugging.htm.
-
New foreign-functions macros with-static-fobject and
with-static-fobjects. with-static-fobject and with-static-fobjects, like the existing with-stack-fobject and with-stack-fobjects, allocate foreign
type objects during the evaluation of a body of code. The existing
macros had the problem that when run interpreted, the objects might be
moved by the garbage collector. The new macros can guarantee that will
not happen. See also the note about changes to with-stack-fobject and with-stack-fobjects in
Section 6.2 Non-backward-compatible changes in the base Lisp below.
-
Errors are signaled more often for floating-point underflows and
overflows. Code which used to simply return 0.0 (in an underflow
situation) or
excl::*infinity-single*
) in an
overflow now may error, signaling a floating-point-underflow or
floating-point-overflow error as appropriate. This change (which is
compliant with ANSI) allows users to control more precisely what they
want in these cases: 0.0, least-positive[something]-float, to switch
from singles to doubles, or whatever. But code which depended on the
older more tolerant behavior will now break. (for example,
(read-from-string "4.9e-324")
signals an error
rather than rturning 0.0 and (expt most-positive-single-float 2)
signals an error rather than returning excl::*infinity-single*.) See
Floating-point infinities and NaNs, and
floating-point underflow and overflow in
implementation.htm for more information and sample
handler code to cath the errors. See also read-tiny-float which can be used to read small
floats safely. As mentioned in
Section 6.3 Other changes to and notes about the base Lisp, the infinity and NaN
constants are now exported.
-
sys:*current-thread* is now a symbol-macro. Any reference to
sys:*current-thread* (except by symbol name) is automatically
transformed into a call to functionality which accesses and returns
the current thread object. This implementation is much more
efficient. User code should not have to be changed except for
references to the symbol name where the value is in some fashion used
(so applying boundp to
'sys:*current-thread*
returns nil
and applying symbol-value to it results in an error.
-
lisp_init() arguments changed. The quiet
argument has been replaced by the
tls_slot_index. See main.htm
for a list of arguments and a discussion of this
change. (quiet was in fact unused. The discussion
is about the new argument.)
-
Foreign-functions macros with-static-fobject and
with-static-fobjects have changed argument lists. The old argument
list was
((var type &etc) &rest
body)
. The new one is ((var type &key
allocation size) &rest body)
. The
etc argument was never documented and it is
unlikely that user code will be affected, but this is a
non-upward-compatible change. The new keyword arguments allow you to
say where the objects should be allocated and how big they should be
(though specifying size means the objects will
not be stack allocated). See also the entry on the new related macros
with-static-fobject and with-static-fobjects in
Section 6.1.2 New features in Allegro CL 8.1 above.
-
Changes to the base64 conversion functions. usb8-array-to-base64-string, string-to-base64-string, base64-string-to-usb8-array, and base64-string-to-string all have new
start and end keyword
arguments that allow specification of only a portion of the input for
conversion. string-to-base64-string and usb8-array-to-base64-string formerly accepted
an optional wrap-at-column argument. Now it is a
keyword argument. The old style is still accepted for compatibility
(but is strongly discouraged; other keyword arguments cannot be
specified if the optional argument calling style is used). string-to-base64-string and base64-string-to-string now accept
an external-format keyword argument. For
compatibility, the default external format used is
(crlf-base-ef :latin1)
. base64-string-to-usb8-array accepts a new
keyword argument output which specifies the
buffer to use for the result. If output is
nil
, or if it is not large enough to hold the
result, a new usb8 array will be allocated and returned. base64-string-to-usb8-array returns
a second value: the number of bytes added to the result usb8 array.
-
New keyword arguments to to excl.osi:with-open-temp-file.
with-open-temp-file has new
filename and
delete leyword
arguments. filename, if specified, must be a
symbol, which will be bound to the actualy filename used for the temp
file during the executaion of the body. delete,
if specified true, causes the temp file to be deleted when the body
completes.
-
SOAP changes: there are some relatively minor change to SOAP
(which is described in soap.htm). These changes are
also backported to Allegro CL 8.0 and 7.0.
-
New keyword argument generate-comments to make-client-interface and make-server-interface causes useful
comments to be written to generated code.
-
New handling of headers. See the beginning of Headers. There is a new function soap-message-headers.
-
Also, various bug fixes, supression of unnecessary comments, and
derivation of server port and publish path from server URL in
generated code.
-
SOAP addition: new method wsdl-add-form. wsdl-add-form
allows application code to add to the generated code.
-
Infinity and Nan constants are now exported. See Floating-point
infinities and NaNs, and floating-point underflow and overflow in
implementation.htm. Also see
*negative-infinity-single*
,
*infinity-double*
,
*infinity-single*
,
*negative-infinity-double*
, *nan-double*
, and *nan-single*
. Floating-point
overflows and underflows now error more often (see
Section 6.2 Non-backward-compatible changes in the base Lisp), so code like
(expt most-positive-single-float 2)
designed to
return infinity will now error. Now *infinity-single*
can be referenced directly.
-
open runs significantly faster. Opening files with open is about twice as fast in 8.1 as
it was in 8.0. You can verify this by running the following function
in both versions:
(compile (defun test ()
(time
(dotimes (n 50000)
(with-open-file (f "/etc/passwd"))))))
-
Warning is signaled for unused flet functions. Allegro CL has
issued warnings for unused labels functions for some time. It now also
issues them for unused flet
functions. The function can be declared
ignore
or
ignorable
using the #' notation --
i.e. (declare (ignore #'my-flet-function)
-- in
either labels or flet.
-
sequence argument to read-vector and write-vector can now be an
aligned pointer. The sequence (the required)
argument to read-vector and
write-vector can now also be
an aligned-pointer, or a
foreign-pointer
with an address component that
is word-aligned. If it is a pointer, the end
keyword argument must also be specified (so the function can know how
long the vector is).
-
lisp-implementation-version now returns two values, the second
identifying the shared library build number. That detail may be
useful in assisting Franz in debugging a problem. See cl:lisp-implementation-version
in implementation.htm. The first return value of
cl:lisp-implementation-version
is a string identifying the version number, the platform, and the date
the product was created.
-
Condition file-incompatible-fasl-error exported and
documented. This is the condition signaled when you try to load
certain inappropriate fasl files into a Lisp image (such as fasl files
compiled in previous versions). The associated error has always been
signaled, but the condition,
file-incompatible-fasl-error
was not
previously exported (from the excl
package).
-
New feature :verify-stack and new compiler switch
verify-stack-switch. On platforms with
:verify-stack
on the *features*
list, checking whether the stack
pointer has gone beyond the stack cushion is expensive. (A stack
cushion is an artifical stack limit. If Lisp can detect when this
limit is reached, it can warn that the stack is about to be exhausted
-- if the stack truly runs out, Lisp will fail.) On such platforms,
the verify-stack-switch
controls whether stack
cushion checking is or is not done in compiled code.
-
console-control now has a title keyword argument. With it,
console-control (a function
only available on Windows) can set the title of the Allegro CL console
window.
-
fasl file headers have more (readable) information. See
Fasl files
in compiling.htm. There are 10 readable lines at
the top of a fasl file. The UNIX head() command will print the
readable head of a fasl file.
-
The address adjustment phase of a garbage collection has been sped
up. The user-visible effect is in faster performance, but the
improvement is noticeable in images with a lot of data (test case
showed a 10x speed up, from several seconds to less than 0.3 seconds).
-
sys:update-allegro will tell you if there is a newer version of
AllegroCache or AllegroGraph available. sys:update-allegro does not itself download
the newer version, but it does tell you how you can get it.
-
Length and offset can be specified for mapped files. Mapped
files are of stream class
mapped-file-simple-stream
. They are created by
specifying :mapped t
to open. open with :mapped t
now
accepts offset and length
keyword arguments. The offset is the number of bytes beyond the start
of the file where the mapping begins, and the length is the length of
the mapping. (The mapped keyword argument is an
Allegro CL extension to open
and is described on the mapped-file-simple-stream
page.)
-
run-shell-command has a new keyword argument
:share-open-files. This new argument to run-shell-command, for Windows only, allows
you to ensure that files opened by a call to run-shell-command are not shared.
-
match-re now opencodes even when :regexp2 has not been
required. match-re has a
compiler-macro, but prior to 8.1, it wasn't used unless the
:regexp2 was required before the compilation. Now, such
compilation of match-re
causes the proper expansion to inline code.
-
The documentation file glossary.htm removed. This file
contained several definitions of terms used in the documentation but
on balanace was not useful.
There are no entries at this time. Information may be placed here in
documentation updates after the initial Allegro CL 8.1 release.
The CLIM manual has not been updated (other than minor corrections)
for the 8.1 release. There have been no significant changes to CLIM
functionality compared to 8.0, though there have been bug fixes and
performance enhancements.
(Repeated mostly from 8.0 Release Notes.)
The documentation for CLIM is in an online PDF file, clim-ug.pdf.
On Linux and FreeBSD, Allegro CLIM works with Open Motif 2.1 and 2.2
(2.2 was released in early 2002). Open Motif 2.2 is available at no
charge from www.openmotif.org. Allegro CL
8.1/Allegro CLIM will work with either version. Redhat Linux 7.2 is
supplied with Lesstif, a version of Motif that does not work with
CLIM. See the Linux architecture specific information in the
Allegro CL
FAQ for information on how to install Redhat Linux 7.2 without
lesstif and how to uninstall lesstif if already present. On all other
Unix platforms, CLIM uses the platform-supplied Motif.
Certain CLIM demos on Solaris 64 bit give segv or otherwise fail
when displaying over the network, language environment must be set to
C. This is a problem when running any Sun GUI (such as the CDE
environment or the Gnome 2.0 interface) on a Solaris64 machine. When
bringing up the environment, set the language/locale to "C". (On the
login screen, there's an "Options" button, which displays a menu that
has a "Languages" submenu. Choose "C". Note: the default value is
typically "en_US".) The "C" setting can process all of the 64-bit
font sets. However, difficulties arise when displaying over the
network. If you are displaying on the monitor of the machine running
Allegro CL (and CLIM), the demos work as long as the language/locale
is "C". They typically do not work when displaying on a monitor over
the network. As of this writing, there is no fix for the problem.
The first
subsection describes changes to Common Graphics and
the IDE that are non backward-compatible. Please review this section
and make whatever necessary changes to your code to obtain the desired
behavior in release 8.1.
The second subsection
describes other changes to Common Graphics and the IDE. These should
not require code changes (please tell us if any do, because that may
indicate a bug), but note that certain function and argument names
have been deprecated in favor of new names, and that new code should
reflect these changes, and old code should be revised at some point.
The section Section 8.4 IDE release notes and its
subsections provide information about the IDE.
New chart drawing utility
A new widget allows drawing bar charts or equivalent line charts. See
cg-chart-widget.htm.
New object-editor and class-grid widgets
These allow you to edit classes and instances. See class-grid
and object-editor
and also cg-object-editor-and-class-grid.htm. There are many
additional classes and operators associated with these classes. They
are linked to from the class description pages.
-
The cg-user package no longer uses the ide package. To avoid
certain name conflicts, the cg-user package no longer uses the ide
package. Therefore, ide functionality must be package-qualified when
called from the Debug window when the current package is cg-user (as
it is when the Debug window is first displayed). This note is repeated
in the IDE
section.
-
Incompatible find-window change. The function find-window now looks only for a child
window by default, rather than for either a child or owned window. To
look for an owned window you must specify the new
owned-p keyword argument as true. This is for
efficiency, to avoid looking at all top-level windows in the system
when calling find-window on a
top-level window. (For finding IDE windows, see the new IDE function
find-ide-window.)
-
Incompatible default for the proportional property of grid
subsections. The default for the proportional property of a
grid-subsection
(either a grid-column
or grid-row
) has changed from t
to nil
. This item is
repeated, with more details, in
Section 8.3.1 Grid-widget-specific changes below.
-
An obscure change to the value returned by
pop-up-message-dialog. For consistency, when there is only a
single choice in pop-up-message-dialog and the user cancels the
dialog, it now returns 1 rather than 2 (and therefore ask-user-for-choice will return the
single choice rather than
nil
).
-
The value property of static-picture can no longer be used to set
the pixmap. As a long-time backward compatibility, you could set
the value property of a
static-picture
to be a
pixmap to specify the image to display. This property is now used for
something else (see pixmap-alist), and so you must use the pixmap, pixmap-name, or pixmap-icon property for the image, as
documented.
-
6.0 project tab control widgets may not display
properly. Widgets on
tab-control
s may be hidden if the code that
creates them was generated for a form in a project and the code has
not been generated since the 6.0 release. If this happens it can be
fixed by removing :state :shrunk initargs in the code that
creates the widgets.
-
define-project is now named by a common-graphics symbol. In
earlier releases, define-project was named by an ide package
symbol, but for technical reasons the symbol has been moved to the
common-graphics package. See the description of define-project.
There are many changes to grid-widget
functionality. They are listed in
Section 8.3.1 Grid-widget-specific changes below.
-
The IDE and generated CG applications will now use Microsoft Visual
Styles by default, for the newer Windows look. To disable this
feature for a generated application, set the include-manifest-file-for-visual-styles
property of the project to
nil
. To disable
the feature for the IDE, rename the file allegro.exe.manifest
in the main Allegro directory to something else and restart the
IDE. The new function a-visual-style-is-active returns whether a
visual style is currently in effect, and selected-tab-color returns the background color
of the body of a tab-control
(which can now differ from the
system-dialog-background-color). Applications
may want to change the background-color property of existing button
widgets to t
so that the background just
outside of their rounded corners will match the color of the parent
window or tab-control.
-
lamp widget improvements including support for placing lamps on
grid-widgets. There are a number of changes to the
lamp
widget. The most important is
new support for placing lamps in cells of a grid-widget
. See the description of the lamp
widget for details.
Other changes include allowing arrays of lamps to have individual
on-colors and off-colors. The default for lamp-height and lamp-width is now 10 pixels. It is no longer
computed using other factors.
-
New initial-focus argument to pop-up-message-dialog. The
function pop-up-message-dialog
has a new initial-focus keyword argument
that gets passed directly to pop-up-modal-dialog. It specifies which widget
on the pop-up dialog will have ficus, and its possible values include
:default
(for the leftmost button),
:cancel
(for the rightmost button), or
:button
n
, for button numbered n (see
the function description for exact details).
-
Menu bars are now possible on child windows on the Windows
platform. There are some caveats. They are discussed in the
description of menu.
-
New function menu-bar-height. The menu-bar-height function returns the standard
height of a menu bar. Because child window menu bars (see previous
entry) are not part of the window's frame, they must be placed in the
user coordinate system of the window. Widgets in the window must be
placed so they do not overlap the menu bar. You use this function to
know how much space to set aside.
-
return-crlf argument to various functions no longer has any
effect. The rather obscure return-crlf
keyword argument of the user functions text-range, get-text, and rich-edit-range has been deprecated and no
longer has any effect. It did not appear feasible to implement it
with the newer version of the RichEdit control that CG now uses, and
should no longer be useful now that the control internally uses a
single character for each newline. The argument had been offered as a
way to cause the character indexes of a string that's read from the
control to match their indexes in the control itself, but that is now
true in the normal case.
-
New menu facility for many choices. The new function pop-up-menus-for-many-sorted-choices
takes a potentially huge list of pre-sorted choices and presents them
to the user as a series of pop-up menus. This makes it feasible to
select one of many choices by letting the user select each successive
unique character of the name of the choice from further pop-up menus.
-
New scrolling-static-text widget. The
scrolling-static-text
widget allows you to
easily place into a dialog a block of text that automatically wraps at
spaces at the widget's width and which also scrolls vertically as
needed. This had been possible to achieve previously by using a
multi-line-editable-text
and setting properties such as read-only to true, border to :none
, and background-color to t
(to match the parent window), but on GTK it was not
possible to change the background color from white. Pertinent
properties of this widget include value (the string to display), horizontal-justification, vertical-justification, margin-around-text, draw-focus, border, and border-color.
-
The text-editing widget uses a newer version of Microsoft's
RichEdit control. On Windows, the CG
text-edit-pane
and rich-edit-pane
windows (and the multi-line-editable-text
and
rich-edit
widgets that use
them) now use version 2 or 3 (depending on the version of Windows) of
Microsoft's RichEdit control, rather than version 1 as before. This
newer version features multi-level undo and redo (for which the IDE
has a new Edit | Redo command, and CG has the new user
function redo-command). It
may have better support for Input Method Editors and be more robust
generally. If necessary, an application could revert to RichEdit
version 1 by setting excl::*richedit-v2*
to nil
, or even revert to the US NT4.0 version of
RichEdit version 1 that we ship by also setting
excl::*use-aclre32.dll*
to true; please tell us if
you find either of these steps necessary so that we can retain these
deprecated options as needed.
-
Faster mouse wheel scrolling in the text-editing widget. CG
overrides the new slower style of mouse wheel scrolling that Microsoft
uses in newer versions of the RichEdit control with faster standard
mouse wheel scrolling.
-
HTML-browsing on GTK uses a third-party browser rather than a CG
widget. On GTK, invoke-html-browser and invoke-private-html-browser will no longer defer
to using a CG html browser, due to the unpredictability of the Mozilla
GTK widget on which it is built. Instead, invoke-private-html-browser will first attempt
to invoke a standalone Firefox HTML browser program by using run-shell-command, and if that fails
it will simply place the URL or file path onto the system clipboard
for the user to paste into an HTML browser by hand. And invoke-html-browser will skip the
Firefox attempt altogether and use the clipboard directly.
-
New functions return the available coordinate space across multiple
monitors. The new functions virtual-screen-left, virtual-screen-top, virtual-screen-width, and virtual-screen-height return coordinates that
denote the extent of all monitors in a multiple-monitor system. They
will return 0, 0,
(screen-width)
, and
(screen-height)
for single-monitor systems as well
as for all systems on GTK. The new functions virtual-exterior and nvirtual-exterior return a box that combines
these four values (when called on the screen; they are the same as
exterior and nexterior when called on a window). The virtual-screen-left may be negative
when a secondary monitor is configured to the left of the primary
monitor.
-
Other functions for the usable coordinate space work better with
multiple monitors. The new functions usable-left and usable-top will return zero for windows. For
the screen, they will return
(virtual-screen-left)
and (virtual-screen-top)
for a multiple monitor
system, or the left and top of the interior of the screen for a single
monitor system. The pre-existing functions usable-width and usable-height will still return the page-width and page-height of a window, or interior-width and interior-height of the screen in a single
monitor system, as before; but for the screen of a multiple-monitor
system, they will now return (virtual-screen-width)
and (virtual-screen-height)
.
-
Tooltips are placed correctly on a secondary monitor that's on the
left. A tooltip that should appear on a secondary monitor that is
configured to the left of the primary monitor (in negative
coordinates) had gotten moved to the primary monitor.
-
The new function frameless-topmost-p may be useful on GTK.
frameless-topmost-p is an
overridable generic function that should return true if and only if
instances of a window class should use the GTK_WINDOW_POPUP style on
GTK. This is the only known way on GTK to make a non-child window
that has no button in the taskbar. This property also forces the
window to be frameless and topmost (in front of all non-topmost
windows in all applications), and so is suitable only for true
temporary "pop-up" windows such as menus and tooltips. This generic
function has no effect on the Windows platform. To make a top-level
window on Windows that has no taskbar button, either give it an owner
window or specify its border property as :palette. (You can
optionally eliminate the palette frame by also specifying the title-bar property as
nil
.)
-
You can now grab the image from a hidden window. Calling
get-pixmap on any window whose
double-buffered property is
true now works when the window is covered or shrunk, by grabbing the
pixels from the backing store rather than from the screen.
-
New options for the directory dialog. There is a new
show-initial-directory-children argument for
ask-user-for-new-or-existing-directory. There is
also a search-network-globally argument to
specify whether to search the network globally or only in the current
context to find the machines to list. This argument is passed to
win:network-machines,
where it may affect performance or which machines are included.
-
pop-up-lettered-menu has a new sort-key keyword argument. This
new argument allows you to specify a key function for the
sort-predicate function. It acts like the
key argument to sort. See pop-up-lettered-menu.
-
New show-help-string-under-mouse property; help-string property
added to hotspots. The new widget/window/hotspot property show-help-string-under-mouse
determines whether the object's help-string is shown in a status-bar whenever
the mouse is over it. And the existing help-string property has been added to
hotspot
s.
-
New hidden-buttons property for multi-picture-button. The
hidden-buttons property can be
a list of button names to hide on a
multi-picture-button
when they are not
applicable in the current context. This is simpler than replacing the
entire list of button-info
objects in the range property,
and retains the order of the buttons when they are added back.
-
New function require-cg-acache. require-cg-acache will load the newest version
of AllegroCache that you have downloaded (unless AllegroCache is
already loaded), and then load the CG module that depends on
AllegroCache. This function is exported in case this loading is not
always done automatically when needed.
-
A generic function for hiding properties. The function property-hidden is now exported,
similar to other attributes of property objects such as property-reader and property-read-only. Methods could be added
that determine whether particular user-defined properties (see defproperties) appear in the
inspector.
-
The template-string facility has been improved. There are new
choices in
*template-chars*
for a template-string. The new function digit-char-or-space-p can be used as a
template char predicate function. Handling of the Delete, Backspace,
Home, and End keys is more useful. Typing with the text cursor at the
rightmost position will now insert characters and shift existing
characters leftward; the Delete key in this position will shift
characters rightward. The on-change function is no longer called on every
keystroke of an editable-text that has a template string and whose
delayed property is true.
Selecting text with the shift key down is now allowed to work as
usual. Typing a character while all text is selected now first clears
the string to its default print string before inserting the typed
character. There is no longer a break when the current widget value
is not the same length as the template-string. Pasting into the
widget will coerce the string to fit the template. The new template-allows-sign property allows
the user to type a plus or minus character to the left of all
non-whitespace characters.
-
New standard light colors. The new global variables
light-red
, light-green
, light-blue
, light-yellow
, light-cyan
, and light-magenta
have been added to
go with existing color variables like red
and dark-red
.
-
New extendable generic function screen-resolution-changed.
screen-resolution-changed will
be called whenever the size of the screen has changed, such as when
using Remote Desktop or attaching a second monitor. An application
could add a method that moves or resizes windows at this time.
-
Moving edited text with the mouse. The control-left-click
gesture in a
lisp-edit-pane
(such as in the IDE editor) to copy the expression at the click
position to the text cursor position will now reindent the copied
lines. And a new control-shift-left-click command will move the text
rather than copying it.
-
Static-picture widgets and the new pixmap-displaying grid cells
allow cycling through a set of pixmaps. A
static-picture
widget can now draw a pixmap that
is mapped from an arbitrary user value to a pixmap by the new pixmap-alist property. (This is also
a feature of the new pixmap-displaying grid cells.) The new property
user-modifiable determines
whether the user is allowed to cycle through the pixmaps, which they
do by clicking the widget or grid cell or by pressing the spacebar
when it has the keyboard focus. The new pixmap-value-test property determines whether a
new user value matches an entry in the pixmap-alist. A static-picture
widget now has the draw-focus property like picture-button
, as well as the
tabstop property.
-
above-parent property of outline-items and handle-above-parent
property of outlines. Both these properties were available in
release 8.0 but not documented. They now are documented. They allow
specifying whether an
outline-item
is displayed above its parent (when
above-parent is set to true
and the handle-above-parent
property of the outline
is
also true).
-
New arguments avoid consing RGB objects. The functions make-rgb, effective-background-color, and effective-foreground-color take a new
scratch-rgb keyword argument, which can be used
to prevent the function from ever consing a new RGB object.
-
Outline-items can be placed above their parent items. The
outline
widget has a new
option to position some child items above their parent items. This
might be useful for indicating that a child item is special in some
way. The child outline-item's above-parent property must be true, and the
outline's handle-above-parent
property must be true. This feature can slow down the redisplay of a
large outline, but only when the outline's handle-above-parent option is turned on.
-
New function scroll-window-into-parent. The new user function
scroll-window-into-parent
scrolls a parent window so that the specified child window is fully
visible (when possible).
-
Using get-screen-box without drawing the box. The function
get-screen-box has a new
no-draw keyword argument that avoids drawing the
rubber-banding box. The function get-screen-pixmap also has this new argument,
which may be needed if the screen is being redrawn in some way as you
select the region to capture.
-
Timers remember their next fire time. The new timer-universal-time property of the
timer
class stores the universal
time at which the timer is currently set to go off, or nil
when the timer is not set. (Not useful for
sub-second times.)
-
New macros with-fill-texture, with-background-texture, and
with-line-texture. The new macros with-fill-texture, with-background-texture, and with-line-texture temporarily sets the fill-texture/background-texture/line-texture of a stream, similar to existing
macros for other drawing attributes such as with-foreground-color and with-line-width.
-
It is easier to add keyboard scrolling behavior to an arbitrary
window. You can enable the new handle-scrolling-keys window property by passing
handle-scrolling-keys initarg to make-window or by calling (setf
handle-scrolling-keys) later. If the user types PageUp,
PageDown, or an arrow key, and no more-specific virtual-key-down method intercepts the
keystroke, then a built-in method will now scroll the window by the
amount returned by a call to scroll-increment. (The
type argument to scroll-increment will be
:page
for the PageUp and PageDown keys, or
:line
for the arrow keys.) If the control key is
held down, then the window will scroll horizontally, and otherwise it
will scroll vertically. Previously you needed to write a custom
virtual-key-down method to
gain this behavior. The handle-scrolling-keys value may be t
to handle all page and arrow keys,
:vertical
to exclude the horizontal arrow keys, or
:page
to exclude all arrow keys.
-
The initial-focus argument to pop-up-modal-dialog is more
flexible. initial-focus argument may now
alternately be the name of the widget rather than the widget itself.
And when the initial-focus widget is a regular button, it will now
also be the initial acting default button (as with set-default-button). See pop-up-modal-dialog.
-
You can determine if the user selected the Print To File
option. If the user selects the Print To File option of a
printer driver's Print Job dialog, then the filename property of the printer stream will be
t
rather than nil
to
indicate that a print-to-file was done. (It does not appear feasible
to find the actual path that the user specified interactively.)
-
list-widget-set-index can now trigger the on-change function.
It has been inconsistent that calls to list-widget-set-index do not cause the widget's
on-change function to be
called, so you can now pass the new
trigger-on-change keyword argument to make that
happen. It is
nil
by default for backward
compatibility, though it is typically best to pass it as true.
-
New aid for displaying a document in a third-party program.
The new Windows-only function windows-command-for-document-type returns a
command-line string that can be used with run-shell-command to invoke whatever program
is registered for handling files of a specified file type. The
setf can even be used to register a particular program for some
file type.
-
Additional def-cg-ocx-control arguments for the Components
Toolbar. The function def-cg-ocx-control has the new keyword arguments
toolbar-after,
toolbar-tooltip, and
toolbar-help-string. These arguments are passed
through to add-to-component-toolbar.
-
New drawing functions let you avoid creating position objects.
The new functions draw-box-x-y, draw-by-x-y, draw-line-x-y, fill-box-x-y, erase-to-x-y, erase-by-x-y, erase-box-x-y, erase-contents-box-x-y, erase-line-x-y, and invert-box-x-y allow drawing lines and boxes
without first creating position objects from the x and y coordinates.
-
You can check whether certain objects have user modifications to
save. The newly-exported generic function modified returns whether an object has unsaved
user changes. Applicable classes in which an application may be
interested include
text-edit-pane
, rich-edit
, grid-widget
, and object-editor
.
-
There is a new macro to temporarily allocate a color. The
newly exported macro with-rgb
allows temporarily using an RGB object rather than consing one.
-
Rich-edit opening and saving can handle plain text. The
function rich-edit-open takes
a new allowed-types argument to pass to ask-user-for-existing-pathname. The
function rich-edit-save takes
a new format argument like that of rich-edit-range, which allows saving
the contents as plain text rather than rich text. The function
rich-edit-save-as takes both
of these arguments, where allowed-types defaults
to
(("Rich text" . "*.rtf"))
when
format is :rich-text
or to
(("Text" . "*.txt"))
when
format is :text
.
-
Keystrokes to open descendent items of an outline-item and
cancelling opening. Control-clicking the icon of an
outline-item
in an outline
widget or selecting the
item and pressing control-right-arrow opens all descendents. If there
are very many (or perhaps the items loop), this can take a long time
and can be canceled with the Escape key. See range-on-open.
-
Drawing functions are now generic. Drawing functions (which are mostly
named draw-something or erase-something
though there are additional ones) have been a mix of generic functions
and non-generic functions, and not for any particularly good
reason. They are now generic functions. The following have been
changed from regular to generic in release 8.1:
draw-by,
draw-by-x-y,
draw-line,
draw-line-x-y,
draw-to-x-y,
erase-box,
erase-box-x-y,
erase-by,
erase-by-x-y,
erase-circle,
erase-circle-arc,
erase-circle-sector,
erase-contents-box,
erase-contents-box-x-y,
erase-contents-circle,
erase-contents-circle-sector,
erase-contents-ellipse,
erase-contents-ellipse-sector,
erase-contents-polygon,
erase-contents-rounded-box,
erase-ellipse,
erase-ellipse-arc,
erase-ellipse-sector,
erase-line,
erase-line-x-y,
erase-polygon,
erase-polyline,
erase-rounded-box,
erase-to,
erase-to-x-y,
move-by,
move-by-x-y,
move-to-x-y,
pixel-x-y.
-
undo-command now works on GTK as well as Windows. See undo-command.
-
New grid-widget utility functions invalidate-whole-section and
cross-section-box. The new function invalidate-whole-section invalidates a grid
section or subsection, while cross-section-box returns a box for the
intersection of a row or row-section with a column or column-section.
-
New grid-widget properties cache-cell-values and
delay-write-cell-value. When cache-cell-values is true, cell values are
cached, allowing them to be retrieved more quickly. You can also use
delay-write-cell-value to wait
until a number of changes (often on a dialog) are made and then write
them all at once or cancel them.
-
The function delete-selected-subsections is more modifiable.
The
grid-widget
function
delete-selected-subsections
now calls the exported generic functions delete-row and delete-column for each deleted subsection so
that you can add wrapper methods for side effects, such as deleting
the data-object of each
deleted row.
-
Minimum size is implemented for grid-widget sections. The
existing minimum-size property
is now also a property of
grid-row
, grid-column
, grid-row-section
, and grid-column-section
. It can have the value
nil
for those objects, which means inherit
from the value for the whole grid-widget
.
-
New grid-column properties. The
grid-column
class now implements the existing
properties horizontal-justification, vertical-justification, single-line, and on-print. It also defines the new properties
horizontal-padding and vertical-padding. Some of these can
be given to a grid-column
instance instead of defining methods on column and row classes for
generic functions such as cell-horizontal-justification and cell-horizontal-padding.
-
New data-slot property of grid-column. A
grid-column
may now be given a data-slot property as an alternative to the
data-reader property. This is
useful when the slot does not have a reader and/or writer function or
those functions are not known.
-
delete-selected-subsections returns a meaningful value. The
return value from the
grid-widget
function delete-selected-subsections is now the list of
subsections that were deleted. This is nil
if
no subsections were selected or if the user canceled the confirmation
dialog.
-
New grid-widget cell type for displaying choices as pixmaps.
The new
pixmap-column-mixin
class can be used for displaying pixmaps in grid cells. Multiple
pixmaps can be supplied to represent various possible user values.
Clicking the cell (or pressing the spacebar when the cell has the
keyboard focus) will cycle to the next pixmap and write the value that
it represents back into user data. This class is similar to existing
classes like editable-text-column-mixin
.
-
New extendable grid-widget generic function
subsection-sequence-changed. An application could define methods
on the new generic function subsection-sequence-changed in order to catch
any time that the sequence of rows or columns in a
grid-section
has changed. It is
called when the user interactively slides rows or columns to change
their order, and when the sequence is changed by calls to (setf subsections),
add-row, add-column, delete-row, and delete-column.
-
Centered check-boxes in grid cells. If a check-box grid column
has no title-reader, meaning
that there will never be text in the cell, then the check-box will now
be centered horizontally.
-
Grid-widgets show unavailable status. A
grid-widget
will now be drawn by default with a
gray foreground color when its available property is nil
.
-
The template-string facility now works in grid-widgets. The
editable-text-column-mixin
class and the combo-box-column-mixin
class now have a template-string property to make
type-in work as with the existing template-string facility of an editable-text
widget.
-
Incompatible default change for the proportional property of grid
subsections. The default value for the proportional property of a
grid-subsection
(either a grid-column
or grid-row
) has changed from t
to nil
, because it is
typically more useful to create them at a size that fits their content
rather than making them stretch to fit the parent grid-section
. The default for grid-section
is still t
. Any application code that did not specify this
property for grid columns or rows and depends on it to be true should
add :proportional t
initargs to the calls to
make-instance that create the
columns and rows.
-
Moving to the very end of a grid-section with PageUp and
PageDown. When scrolling a
grid-widget
section with the PageUp and PageDown
keys, if the section is already scrolled to the end then a further
keystroke will move the focus to the endmost subsection. This makes
it easier to move all the way to the end subsection when the Home and
End keys won't do it because the focus is in an editable text cell.
-
Non-backward-compatible change: you may need to qualify IDE
symbols. The
cg-user
package no longer uses the
ide package, to avoid a problem where a local variable in user code
that has the same name as an exported IDE symbol would be written into
the user's fasl file as the symbol in the ide package. This would
break in a standalone application where the ide package does not
exist. This change means that when in the cg-user package in the IDE,
you must add an ide: package qualifier to any IDE symbols that you use
programmatically. (This item also appears in
Section 8.2 Non-backward-compatible changes in Common Graphics above.)
-
The IDE now uses a parent window rather than an owner window.
The use-ide-parent-window IDE
configuration option is now turned on by default on the Windows
platform (as on GTK before), now that we have implemented a way for
form windows to have menu-bars when they are child windows. The IDE's
main window also has scrollbars to allow arranging IDE tool windows
into a larger space than will fit on the screen. Using an IDE command
to select an IDE tool window will automatically scroll it fully into
view. There are also commands on the View | Manage Windows menu
whose keyboard shortcuts can be used to scroll the entire IDE with
keystrokes at any time.
-
There is a new Class Interface Editor dialog in the IDE. The
Class
Interface Editor dialog allows you to interactively set up an
object-editor
dialog or
class-grid
widget (which
are new in CG) for editing the slot values of the instances of some
class, typically from a database. You can specify which slots should
have widgets or grid columns as well what type of widget to use for
each slot. This creates the edited-slots property for an object-editor
or class-grid
interactively so that
you don't need to remember the format of that large property value and
write it by hand.
-
New Redo command for the editor. There is a new Redo
command on the Edit
menu (on the Windows platform only). The keyboard shortcut
for the File | Compile command has changed from
control-Y to control-shift-Y so that the new Edit |
Redo command can use control-Y to follow the usual
convention.
-
The name of the IDE options file now includes the lisp version.
The name of the options file (aka preferences file) will now
include the major and minor version numbers of the lisp, as in
allegro-prefs-8-1. This is to avoid a problem where
exiting one version of lisp and then starting an older version could
break because new configuration options saved by the newer version do
not exist in the older version. This means that if you want to use an
existing options file when you install a new release of Allegro, you
will need to rename the options file accordingly.
-
New utility functions for debugging output to an IDE listener.
The newly-exported macro with-output-to-ide-listener and function format-debug make it convenient for
application code to write debugging output to the currently selected
IDE listener.
-
eval-in-listener-thread has new funcall option and a new
trap-errors keyword argument. The function eval-in-listener-thread has a new keyword
argument to funcall (rather
than eval) the main argument
(which should be a funcallable object that will be passed no
arguments). Another new keyword argument is
trap-errors. It controls handling of errors
signaled while the main argument is being evaluated or funcalled.
-
The positioning of the Debug Window and Editor has changed.
The IDE's Debug Window and Editor now default to a larger size and are
placed side by side (though overlapped to make each one adequately
wide).
-
No Startup Action dialog until there are recent projects to
reopen. The Startup Action dialog will now appear
at IDE startup only if the ask-for-action-at-ide-startup option is enabled
(as before) and there is at least one previously opened project
that can be offered in the list of recent projects to reopen.
-
You can avoid the confirmation dialog for unqualified symbols.
The new IDE configuration option ask-before-assuming-package determines whether
a confirmation dialog will appear if you invoke an IDE command in a
text control where there is a string that does not name a symbol in
the current package, but does name a symbol in some other package.
The default value is
nil
, meaning that the
IDE will proceed to act on that symbol without showing the
confirmation dialog. To restore the 8.0 behavior, where a dialog will
ask whether you intended to act on the found symbol, set this option
to true. The Find
In Files dialog will never pop up a dialog about the package,
as many users found that was more annoying than useful in this dialog.
-
Complete History Expression can now retrieve earlier matches.
If you type the first part of a previously-evaluted form into an IDE
listener and then invoke the Complete History Expression button
(typically by typing its shortcut, alt-L), but the form that's copied
to the prompt is not the one that you're looking for, then you can
invoke the command repeatedly until the desired match appears at the
prompt.
-
The IDE will rescue windows that get moved off the screen. If
you somehow manage to move an IDE tool dialog so that it is completely
off the screen, then the IDE will automatically move it into view the
next time you invoke the dialog with its usual command. (Selecting
the window in the View |
Window List window already did this.)
-
The patches dialog can handle firewall proxies. The Download Patches
dialog now has widgets for specifying an HTTP proxy when needed.
These values (except for the password) are saved into the new default-http-proxy IDE configuration
option to remember the values in future IDE sessions.
-
New function selected-listener-pane. The function selected-listener-pane has been
exported for returning the currently-selected IDE listener pane. It
may be desirable to print debugging output to this particular stream.
-
A new macro for printing to the IDE listener. The macro
with-output-to-ide-listener
is handy for directing stream output to the currently selected IDE
listener window (though IDE Listener processes do that already). It
finds the proper window and also has options for first moving to the
end of the text and for printing a fresh prompt or scrolling to the
top of the output after printing.
-
Building a distribution lets you overwrite an existing
subdirectory. The File | Build Project
Distribution command now
allows replacing an existing directory with the new distribution
directory as long as the specified directory is a subdirectory of the
project's default directory. Replacing an existing directory had been
totally disallowed for safety reasons, but made it inconvenient to
reuse multiple distribution directories or to reuse a single
distribution directory after deleting the preferences file.
-
Build Project Distribution no longer does a purify by default.
The purify option is no longer turned on by default for a
standalone application that is generated for a project, to remove the
additional .pll file from the distribution and avoid a possible
conflict with its positioning in memory at run time.
-
New widgets on the toolbar. The Components Toolbar has
new buttons for creating the new
chart-widget
and class-grid
controls. (It is more feasible to
develop a class-grid
on a
form than it has been for the general grid-widget
.)
-
A new menu of definitions in the current buffer. The new
editor keystroke Control-comma will show a menu of all definitions in
the buffer, and selecting one jumps to that definition.
Control-alt-comma does the same thing except also sorting the
definitions by their names.
-
A new function for finding IDE windows. The new function
find-ide-window may be called
to find an IDE window from its name. This may be useful if you are
extending the IDE by operating on its windows programmatically. This
function will work regardless of the value of the use-ide-parent-window configuration option. It
may especially be needed due to the incompatible change to find-window.
-
Resizing grid sections on a form. You can now interactively
resize
grid-widget
sections and subsections on a form window just as you would on the
running window. (This is most useful with the new class-grid
control, which is
feasible to develop on a form.)
-
New keyboard shortcuts on a form window. You can now show a
form window's shortcut menu by pressing the spacebar (as an
alternative to right-clicking). And you can deselect all selected
widgets by pressing the backspace key (which complements using the Tab
key to select successive widgets).
-
New icons in the Project Manager. The Edit Dialog Form
and Edit Source Code buttons in the Project Manager dialog
have new icons to make it easier to tell them apart.
-
Different keyboard shortcuts in the Project Manager. The
Project Manager's right-button shortcut menu has different keyboard
shortcuts that don't conflict with menu-bar accessors and that are
hopefully easier to remember.
-
Better default directory for adding a subproject. When using
the Project
Manager's Add button to add a subproject, the file
selection dialog now begins in the parent project's directory rather
than in the directory that was last used in the file dialog.
-
Project Manager buttons disabled when inapplicable. The
Project
Manager's toolbar buttons are now disabled when they are not
applicable to the currently selected tab or to the module that's
selected in the list of modules.
-
You can show the Project Manager's menu with the spacebar.
When the keyboard focus is in the Project Manager's list of
modules, you can now show its right-click shortcut menu by pressing
the spacebar. Also, pressing the Enter key in this widget will
emulate the View Selected Code button in the toolbar.
-
The Options Dialog includes several addtional configuration options
and several have been removed. The new and removed options on the
Options dialog
include query-os-exit and
ask-before-assuming-package
(a new one) on the IDE 1 tab, use-cg-html-browser (titled Show IDE Help
Within the IDE) and move-ide-windows-on-screen-resize (another new
one) on the IDE 2 tab, and project-parent-directory on the Project tab.
scroll-while-tracing has been
removed because it is on the Trace Dialog. class-graph-initial-depth has been removed due
to obscurity. There are still some options that are not on the
dialog, but they generally are either obscure or have other interfaces
in the IDE for controlling them.
-
Window positions and sizes are now remembered for each screen
resolution. The IDE's options file will now save a distinct set
of positions and sizes of the IDE tool windows for each different
screen resolution at which the IDE is run. When first creating each
tool window after starting the IDE, it will be created at the position
and size that it had when the options file was last saved at the
current screen resolution, if any, and otherwise it will be created at
its default position and size. In addition, the new move-ide-windows-on-screen-resize configuration
option determines whether the IDE will automatically move and resize
its tool windows in this way when the screen resolution changes while
the IDE is running. (This can happen, for example, when switching to
or from a Remote Desktop session or when attaching or removing an
auxilliary monitor.) This option is enabled by default.
-
Interrupting reindentation in the editor. It is now possible
to interrupt the Edit | Reindent command by pressing the Escape
key. (That command can take a while for a long form.) The form may
be left partially reindented, though.
-
Newline added after pasting blocks of text. Pasting multiple
lines of text into the middle of line of text in a lisp-editor-pane
(such as an IDE editor pane) will insert a newline afterward
automatically.
-
An obscure directory dialog option. The new IDE configuration
option directory-dialog-searches-network-globally
determines the value that the IDE will pass for the
search-network-globally argument of ask-user-for-new-or-existing-directory whenever
an IDE command presents the directory-selecting dialog. This value
may affect performance or which machines are listed.
-
A distinct options file for the Express version. The string
"-express" is now included in the options file name for the Express
release to distinguish it from an options file for a non-Express
product on the same machine.
-
Listener panes now list restarts. The IDE debugger will now
print the available restarts into the listener pane to match the
behavior of a non-IDE lisp.
-
A new function tells you where IDE preferences are saved. The
function ide:options-path
returns the path to which the IDE would save its file of user
preferences. The user-specific argument can be
passed as true or
nil
to find the path that
would be used for each value of the save-options-to-user-specific-file option. The
default value of this argument is true (as is the default value of the
save-options-to-user-specific-file option).
-
The keyboard shortcut for Close Pane is more convenient. The
shortcut for the File | Close Pane command is now
control-alt-X instead of control-F4, because the latter is harder to
reach. Control-F4 still works, though, because it's been added to the
IDE's global keyboard shortcuts for backward compatibility (and
because that keystroke is a semi-standard Windows keystroke).
-
More useful Enter key handling in the Trace Dialog. Pressing
the Enter key in the Trace Dialog will now do something reasonable for
the widget that currently has the keyboard focus (generally whatever
double-clicking it does), instead of invoking whichever button widget
most recently had the focus.
-
Copying evaluated forms from the editor to the listener. When
using the numeric keypad Enter key (or the main Enter key with the Alt
key held down) to evalaute the form after the text cursor in the
editor, the evaluated form will now be copied to the IDE listener if
the control key is held down. This helps to see the context of a
series of evaluated forms, though on the other hand it can clutter up
the listener when evaluating large forms.
-
No snapping to the grid when dragging widgets on a form window.
The snap-to-grid option of
form windows is now off by default because it makes it more difficult
to align widgets with each other rather than to the arbitrary grid.
-
Find In Files reports total matches. The Find In Files dialog
now reports the total number of matches found in all files (or editor
panes) that were searched.
-
A project can handle an on-initialization function in an unrelated
package. A package problem should no longer occur when opening or
loading a project if the .lpr project definition file contains a
symbol (such as the on-initialization function) that's in a
non-built-in package that is also not the project's default package.
-
The autoload-warning property of a project is no longer on by
default. Autoload-warning is now
nil
initially to match the generate-application default and because it
causes a break if you do not have permission to write to the lisp
installation directory. This doesn't affect the value for existing
projects.
-
define-project is now named by a common-graphics symbol. In
earlier releases, define-project was named by an ide package symbol,
but for technical reasons the symbol has been moved to the
common-graphics package. See the description of define-project.
Allegro CL 8.0 projects should open without problem in Allegro CL
8.1.
For complete information on the differences between Windows and GTK,
please see
cggtk-relnotes.html.
Common Graphics and the IDE now run on Windows and Linux with
GTK. Certain differences between the two operating systems and
windowing systems mean that some things do not work the same in
Windows as in GTK and vice versa. The functionality listed here
tries to handle the differences. Some of the
variables/operators/etc. are only available on one of the two platforms.
Known bug with menu-items and buttons
GTK Only: all-black menu-items and half-black buttons. There
is still a mystery on the GTK platform where all button widgets can
turn half black along a diagonal line, and all menu-items on some
platforms will be totally black. This seems to happen only when
opening a project from the Startup Action dialog, though, so a
workaround is to not reopen a project from that dialog and instead to
use the Recent menu
or File | Open Project just afterward. We
have tracked the problem down to the use of transparent-pane windows
such as the frame-child of a form window, but beyond that it is a
total mystery.
Mozilla support
The system needs to know the directory where the GTK control supplied
by Mozilla to support the html-widget
resides. (On windows, the widget is
implemented in another way.) It may not be practical to search for the
location automatically. See mozilla-library-path, *mozilla-library-path*
, and find-mozilla-gtk-path.
Event handler processes
Because Linux currently does not use native threads and Windows does,
on Windows, all windows handle events in their own thread associated
with the window while on Linux/GTK, there is one event-handling
thread. default-application-window-subkey, *use-single-cg-event-handling-process*
, and
*single-cg-event-handling-process*
allow
distinguishing behavior when necessary. cg-process-wait should be used on GTK instead of
process-wait in event
handlers. See also process-pending-events-if-event-handler.
Miscellaneous
-
Linux has a built-in hand cursor, which is the value of
hand-cursor
. That variable is
nil
on windows. (find-cursor
:hand-cursor)
works correctly on both,
-
Linux pixel size issues: because Linux/GTK seems not to have a
reliable notion of pixel size, the functions pixels-to-points, points-to-pixels, and font-pixel-height are provided. They work on
Windows but are usually not necessary.
-
Timer resolution on Linux/GTK: see
*cg-timer-resolution*
.
-
Check marks in menus: on Linux/GTK: you must specify at
creation time whether a menu-item will ever be checked. See checkable.
-
Modal dialogs: when displaying a modal dialog, the owner window
is usually disabled. On GTK, this may take too long.
*modal-dialogs-disable-owner*
handles this.
-
f10 key: it requires special handling on Linux.GTK, see handle-f10.
-
Scroll increments: the new function scroll-increment is needed on Linux/GTK. It
works on Windows but there it is essentially the same as user-scroll (which does not work on
Linux.GTK).
-
Using the IDE parent-window: issues of mixing windows from
various applications are more complex on Linux/GTK than on
Windows. See the functions use-ide-parent-window, maximize-ide, ide-exterior, and top-ide-window, and the classes
ide-parent-window
, ide-child-window
, and ide-owner-window
. The IDE menu item
View |
Maximize IDE (Linux/GTK only) is related.
-
On GTK, the help commands use a third-party browser rather than a dialog
within the IDE. On GTK, the IDE's help facility will no longer
use a CG html browser inside the IDE by default, due to the
unpredictability of the Mozilla GTK widget on which it is built.
Instead, use-cg-html-browser
will default to
nil
so that a standalone
browser is used. If the value of this configuration option is still
true from an earlier release, you may wish to change it to nil
. If use-cg-html-browser is true and the CG browser
fails, the IDE will automatically turn the option off for you, though
it's possible for the IDE to be hung at that point so that you cannot
save the options file. When use-cg-html-browser is nil
, then a standalone Firefox is invoked if use-private-html-browser is true, and
otherwise the URL or file path is simply placed onto the system
clipboard for the user to paste into an HTML browser program.
The winapi module contains certain functions, in the windows package,
that perform OS-related tasks. See The Windows API and a Windows API program with
windows but without CG in cgide.htm for
more information. The following changes were made in this module in
release 8.1.
-
Some foreign functions in the winapi module have been changed from
:release-heap :when-ok to :release-heap :never. This was done
mostly for efficiency reasons, to avoid the overhead of releasing the
heap for functions that would clearly never call back into another
lisp process. There is a slight chance that one of these functions
actually will call back into another lisp process, leading to a
deadlock. This has not happened in our testing, and so we do not
expect it to be a problem. (See the
release-heap keyword argument to def-foreign-call for
information on releasing the heap.)
-
New global keyword argument for win:network-machines and
win:network-shares. The functions win:network-machines and win:network-shares each have a new keyword
argument called
global. When true, the entire network is
searched. When
nil
, only the "current and
default network context" is searched. In 7.0 and 8.0 these functions
always behaved as if global was true, but the
default has now been changed to nil
to avoid
waiting on parts of the network that might have a significantly
delayed response. To match the earlier behavior, you must pass this
argument explicitly as true.
-
New return-tree keyword argument to win:network-machines. The
function win:network-machines
has a new return-tree keyword argument.
When this argument is true and the new global
keyword argument is true (see above), the returned list will be a tree
structure similar to the My Network Places tree in the Windows
File Manager. When
nil
(the default), a
simple list of all machines will be returned as before.
-
New allowed value for machines argument to
win:network-shares. The value of the required
machine argument to win:network-shares has an additional
possible value, which is the symbol
:tree
for
returning the set of all networked machines and their shares as a tree
rather than a list (when the new global argument
(see above) is true.
-
Behavior of win:network-machines and win:network-shares when there
is an error. If an unknown error occurs in win:network-machines or win:network-shares while trying to access a
particular machine, then the symbol
:unknown-error
will be returned rather than signaling an error. (For win:network-shares, this symbol
would replace the list of shares for a particular machine in the
returned list.) This is similar to returning
:access-denied
when a machine does not allow
access.
CLX (Common Lisp X) provides an interface between Common Lisp and the
X window system. All versions of Allegro CL include a compiled
version of CLX with the distribution. The fasl
file is code/clx.fasl, loaded by evaluating
(require :clx)
. The Allegro CL products CLIM and
Allegro Composer use CLX. Users wanting low-level access to an X
server in Lisp may also want to use CLX. CLX is not supported by
Franz Inc.
The sources to CLX are supplied with the regular Allegro CL
distributions in the contrib/clx/ directory. Note
that during installation, you are asked whether you wish to install
the contrib/ directory and the default is not to
install it. The contrib/ directory is not
included in the Trial distribution, but Trial users can download the
CLX sources from the Franz Inc. website as described next.
The sources to CLX are also available on the Franz Inc. web site (www.franz.com), at the location ftp://ftp.franz.com/pub/clx/.
No significant changes.
We discuss ANSI conformance in Conformance with the ANSI specification
in implementation.htm. Elsewhere in
implementation.htm we discuss specifics of our
implementation of certain Common Lisp functionality.