~drizzle-trunk/drizzle/development

New in alpha3.4:  The complex bug alluded to below has been fixed (in a

slightly kludgey temporary way that may hurt efficiency a bit; this is

another "get it out the door for 4.4" release).  The tests at the end of

the tests file have accordingly been uncommented.  The primary sign of

the bug was that something like a?b matching ab matched b rather than ab.

(The bug was essentially specific to this exact situation, else it would

have shown up earlier.)

New in alpha3.3:  The definition of word boundaries has been altered

slightly, to more closely match the usual programming notion that "_"

is an alphabetic.  Stuff used for pre-ANSI systems is now in a subdir,

and the makefile no longer alludes to it in mysterious ways.  The

makefile has generally been cleaned up some.  Fixes have been made

(again!) so that the regression test will run without -DREDEBUG, at

the cost of weaker checking.  A workaround for a bug in some folks'

<assert.h> has been added.  And some more things have been added to

tests, including a couple right at the end which are commented out

because the code currently flunks them (complex bug; fix coming).

Plus the usual minor cleanup.

New in alpha3.2:  Assorted bits of cleanup and portability improvement

(the development base is now a BSDI system using GCC instead of an ancient

Sun system, and the newer compiler exposed some glitches).  Fix for a

serious bug that affected REs using many [] (including REG_ICASE REs

because of the way they are implemented), *sometimes*, depending on

memory-allocation patterns.  The header-file prototypes no longer name

the parameters, avoiding possible name conflicts.  The possibility that

some clot has defined CHAR_MIN as (say) `-128' instead of `(-128)' is

now handled gracefully.  "uchar" is no longer used as an internal type

name (too many people have the same idea).  Still the same old lousy

performance, alas.

New in alpha3.1:  Basically nothing, this release is just a bookkeeping

convenience.  Stay tuned.

New in alpha3.0:  Performance is no better, alas, but some fixes have been

made and some functionality has been added.  (This is basically the "get

it out the door in time for 4.4" release.)  One bug fix:  regfree() didn't

free the main internal structure (how embarrassing).  It is now possible

to put NULs in either the RE or the target string, using (resp.) a new

REG_PEND flag and the old REG_STARTEND flag.  The REG_NOSPEC flag to

regcomp() makes all characters ordinary, so you can match a literal

string easily (this will become more useful when performance improves!).

There are now primitives to match beginnings and ends of words, although

the syntax is disgusting and so is the implementation.  The REG_ATOI

debugging interface has changed a bit.  And there has been considerable

internal cleanup of various kinds.

New in alpha2.3:  Split change list out of README, and moved flags notes

into Makefile.  Macro-ized the name of regex(7) in regex(3), since it has

to change for 4.4BSD.  Cleanup work in engine.c, and some new regression

tests to catch tricky cases thereof.

New in alpha2.2:  Out-of-date manpages updated.  Regerror() acquires two

small extensions -- REG_ITOA and REG_ATOI -- which avoid debugging kludges

in my own test program and might be useful to others for similar purposes.

The regression test will now compile (and run) without REDEBUG.  The

BRE \$ bug is fixed.  Most uses of "uchar" are gone; it's all chars now.

Char/uchar parameters are now written int/unsigned, to avoid possible

portability problems with unpromoted parameters.  Some unsigned casts have

been introduced to minimize portability problems with shifting into sign

bits.

New in alpha2.1:  Lots of little stuff, cleanup and fixes.  The one big

thing is that regex.h is now generated, using mkh, rather than being

supplied in the distribution; due to circularities in dependencies,

you have to build regex.h explicitly by "make h".  The two known bugs

have been fixed (and the regression test now checks for them), as has a

problem with assertions not being suppressed in the absence of REDEBUG.

No performance work yet.

New in alpha2:  Backslash-anything is an ordinary character, not an

error (except, of course, for the handful of backslashed metacharacters

in BREs), which should reduce script breakage.  The regression test

checks *where* null strings are supposed to match, and has generally

been tightened up somewhat.  Small bug fixes in parameter passing (not

harmful, but technically errors) and some other areas.  Debugging

invoked by defining REDEBUG rather than not defining NDEBUG.

New in alpha+3:  full prototyping for internal routines, using a little

helper program, mkh, which extracts prototypes given in stylized comments.

More minor cleanup.  Buglet fix:  it's CHAR_BIT, not CHAR_BITS.  Simple

pre-screening of input when a literal string is known to be part of the

RE; this does wonders for performance.

New in alpha+2:  minor bits of cleanup.  Notably, the number "32" for the

word width isn't hardwired into regexec.c any more, the public header

file prototypes the functions if __STDC__ is defined, and some small typos

in the manpages have been fixed.

New in alpha+1:  improvements to the manual pages, and an important

extension, the REG_STARTEND option to regexec().