[q-lang-users] Q 7.11 released

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi all,

I've just uploaded the final Q 7.11 release. You can get it here:
http://q-lang.sourceforge.net/download.html

Here's the obligatory blurb from the NEWS file:

- As suggested by Rob Hubbard and John Cowan, special Unicode characters
in strings can now be specified using an escape of the form '\&name;',
where name is any of the XML entity names specified here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xml-entity-names-20071214/

- clib now provides a set of additional int/float vector operations, as
suggested by John Cowan on the mailing list a while ago. These allow you
to treat byte strings as mutable C vectors of signed/unsigned 8/16/32
bit integers or float/double values. Operations to convert between such
C vectors and corresponding lists of integers/floating point values are
provided as well.

- The glob and regex functions were moved back from system into clib.
Also, a bug in the await function function was fixed (now it properly
accepts timeouts specified in seconds, not millisecs), and support for
mutex and semaphore timeouts was added to the try function (this
requires a system with pthread_mutex_timedlock/sem_timedwait).

- Added support for highres timers (clock_gettime et al) on systems
where the POSIX timer extension is available. The system module provides
a number of new functions (nanotime, nanosleep, etc.) to deal with
these. Moreover, the builtin time function will now also make use of
clock_gettime/gettimeofday if they are available.

- Worked around some quirks with the MS Access ODBC driver which caused
it to reject NULL and empty string parameter values in SQL insert
statements. (Bug reported by Jiri Spitz.) The odbc_examp.q script now
also works with MS Access on Windows. Moreover, as suggested by Tim
Haynes, there are a couple of new functions to retrieve additional
metadata about a data source.

- Jiri Spitz also contributed a much improved AVL tree implementation
for the container types (bag.q, dict.q, hdict.q, set.q). The improved
algorithm has its origin in the SWI-Prolog implementation of association
lists by R.A.O'Keefe and Jan Wielemaker (see assoc.pl at
http://www.swi-prolog.org). Jiri rewrote the algorithm in Q and also
added the deletion operations which were missing in the Prolog version.
Tests indicate that updating the new data structures is at least twice
as fast for large trees, quite a notable improvement!

Thanks to all who contributed code and participated in the discussions
leading up to this release!

Enjoy. :)
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag