Steel Bank Common Lisp

I apparently sent the original announcement someplace silly, and my
laptop's hard disk failed completely shortly afterward, taking a few
days of mail records to the great bit bucket in the sky, so now I
can't think of any way to find find out where the original
announcement went. (My best guess was sbcl-devel, but I don't see it
the announcement in the archives. Hmm.)

So I'll try again. Please bear with me if you've already read this and
I'm just having archival difficulties.

This release has several packaging-related changes:
  -- The default .core file location has changed.
  -- The system now ships with some contrib/ stuff which can be installed
     using REQUIRE.
  -- REQUIRE and PROVIDE have been fiddled with to support this.
Hopefully this will all work smoothly and self-consistently, but if
you have your own software which makes assumptions about the layout of
SBCL's files, it could be confused by the changes.
  
As usual, binaries become available later than sources, but since this
time the announcement is even later than that, binaries are already
available.

from the NEWS file:
changes in sbcl-0.7.13 relative to sbcl-0.7.12:
  * incompatible packaging change: in line with Unix convention, 
    SBCL now looks for its core file in /usr/{local/,}lib/sbcl/sbcl.core 
    if it's not in $SBCL_HOME.  It also sets SBCL_HOME to match.
  * REQUIRE and PROVIDE are now optionally capable of doing something
    useful. See the documentation string for REQUIRE.
  * infrastructure for a managed SBCL contrib system: contributed 
    modules in this release include:
    ** the ASDF system definition facility;
    ** an interface to the BSD Sockets API;
    ** an ACL-like convenience interface to the repl; 
       (thanks to Kevin Rosenberg)
    ** an implementation of ROTATE-BYTE, with efficient implementation
       on x86 hardware;
  * fixed a bug in LOG, so that LOG of a rational argument near 1 now
    gives a closer approximation to the right answer than previously.
    (thanks to Raymond Toy)
  * fixed bug 157: TYPEP, SUBTYPEP, UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE and
    UPGRADED-COMPLEX-PART-TYPE now take (ignored, in all situations)
    optional environment arguments, as required by ANSI.
  * fixed bugs in other functions taking environment objects, allowing
    calls with an explicit NIL environment argument to be compiled
    without error.
  * fixed bug 228: primary return values from
    FUNCTION-LAMBDA-EXPRESSION are either NIL or suitable for input to
    COMPILE or FUNCTION.
  * fixed a bug in DEFSTRUCT: predicates for :NAMED structures with
    :TYPE will no longer signal errors on innocuous objects.
  * fixed bug 231b: SETQ is better at respecting type declarations in
    the lexical environment.
  * fixed a bug in DEFCLASS: classes named by symbols with no or
    unprintable packages can now be defined.
  * fixed a bug in RESTART-BIND: The :TEST-FUNCTION option had been
    carelessly renamed to :TEST-FUN.  (thanks to Robert E. Brown)
  * fixed compiler failure related to checking types of functions.
    (reported by Robert E. Brown)
  * the compiler is now much more consistent in its error-checking
    treatment of bounding index arguments to sequence functions: in
    (SAFETY 3) code, errors will be signalled in almost all cases if
    invalid sequence bounding indices are passed to functions defined
    by ANSI to operate on sequences.
  * fixed a bug in the build procedure: documentation of SBCL-specific
    packages is now preserved and available in the final Lisp image.
  * lifted FDEFINITION lookup out of loops in the implementation of
    many list operations.  (thanks to Robert E. Brown)
  * fixed a bug in the reader: the #n# reader macro now works for
    objects of type STANDARD-OBJECT.  (reported by Tony Martinez)
  * the compiler is now aware that SYMBOL-FUNCTION returns a FUNCTION
    and that READ-DELIMITED-LIST returns a LIST.  (thanks to Robert
    E. Brown and Tony Martinez respectively)
  * PCL is now smarter about SLOT-VALUE, (SETF SLOT-VALUE) and
    SLOT-BOUNDP: in particular, it is now able to optimize them much
    better, and is now not vulnerable to having packages renamed.
    Furthermore, a compliance bug has been fixed: SLOT-MISSING is now
    always called when a slot is not present in an instance.  (thanks
    to Gerd Moellmann)
  * fixed a bug related to CONCATENATED-STREAMs: PEEK-CHAR will no
    longer signal an error on unreading a character following EOF on
    the previous constituent stream.  (thanks to Tony Martinez)
  * fixed some bugs revealed by Paul Dietz' test suite:
    ** ARRAY-IN-BOUNDS-P now allows arbitrary integers as arguments,
       not just nonnegative fixnums;
    ** the logical bit-array operators such as BIT-AND now accept an
       explicit NIL for their "opt-arg" argument (to indicate a
       freshly-consed result bit-array);
    ** ELT now signals an error on an invalid sequence index in safe
       code;
    ** the type system is now cleverer about negations of numeric
       types, and consequently understands the BIGNUM and RATIO types
       better;
    ** the type system is now cleverer about the interaction between
       INTEGER and RATIO types: while bugs still remain, many more
       cases are accurately computed;
    ** in TYPECASE, OTHERWISE now only introduces an otherwise-clause
       if it is in the last clause;
    ** CONSTANTLY now correctly returns a side-effect-free function in
       all cases;
    ** DECLARE is no longer treated as a special-operator; in
       particular, SPECIAL-OPERATOR-P no longer returns T for DECLARE;
  * incremented fasl file version number due to the change in the
    DEFSTRUCT-SLOT-DESCRIPTION structure.

-- 
William Harold Newman <william.newman@...>
"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire,
and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." -- Terry Pratchett
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