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MIT/GNU Scheme release notes

Stable release 12.1

• Bug fix Bug fixes, see the changelog for more info.

Testing release 12.0.90

Changes for R7RS compliance:

• Improvement Complete rewrite of syntax-rules to support new features.
• Bug fix Handle circularities in reader; previously we only handled shared structure.
• Bug fix Handle circularities in equal?.
• Bug fix Fix reading of dot notation.
• Bug fix Fix a number of problems with R7RS libraries.

Changes to arithmetic:

• Feature New arithmetic procedures:
  • (sqrt1pm1 z) computes sqrt(1 + z) - 1, with low relative error even for values of z near zero
  • (rsqrt z) computes 1/sqrt(z)
  • (compound z w) computes (1 + z)^w, with low relative error even for values of z near zero
  • (compoundm1 z w) computes (1 + z)^w - 1, with low relative error even for values of z near zero
• Feature New floating-point procedures:
  • (flo:sqrt1pm1 x)
  • (flo:rsqrt x)
  • (flo:compound x y)—note y must be a flonum, not an exact integer
  • (flo:compoundm1 x y)
• Feature New procedures for base-2 and base-10 exponentials and logarithms:
  • (exp2 z)
  • (exp10 z)
  • (exp2m1 z)
  • (exp10m1 z)
  • (log2 z)
  • (log10 z)
  • (log2p1 z)
  • (log10p1 z)
  Additionally, logp1 is added as an alias for log1p. These follow IEEE 754-2019, except that they are not necessarily correctly rounded.
• Feature New procedures sin-pi*, cos-pi*, tan-pi*, asin/pi, cos/pi, atan/pi. These compute the standard trigonometric functions in units of half-revolutions rather than radians.
• Feature New procedures versin, exsec, aversin, aexsec. These compute the historical trigonometric functions

  versin z = 1 - cos z
  exsec z = (1 - cos z)/cos z,
  

  which are useful because they are well-conditioned near zero unlike cosine, and as such were used in many historical trigonometric computations and tables. (In contrast, the other trigonometric torments like secant and hacovercosine and excosecant aren't terribly useful.)
• Feature New procedures versin-pi*, exsec-pi*, aversin/pi, aexsec/pi. These are like versin and exsec but in units of half-revolutions rather than radians.
• Improvement Complex division avoids spurious overflow and underflow much more often.
• Improvement The procedures log, exp, log1p, and expm1 now have better error bounds for complex inputs, and no longer overflow unnecessarily. (expm1 x+iy) is still bad when x ~ 0 and e^x cos y ~ 1 but it should be improved on much of the rest of the complex plane.
• Bug fix sqrt no longer spuriously overflows on certain complex inputs. (However, it may still spuriously raise a floating-point overflow exception on an exact input, even if the resulting value is correct and exact.)

Other changes:

• Incompatible change Eliminate import! procedure. That functionality is now provided by the ,(import …) REPL escape.
• Incompatible change Don't convert strings to NFC by default. This caused several issues which are explained in bug #62618.
• Feature The merge-sort, merge-sort!, quick-sort, and quick-sort! procedures, as well as the sort and sort! aliases for merge sort, now accept an optional parameter for a procedure to map an element to a sorting key. Example:

  (merge-sort '((123 . value0) (456 . value1) (78 . value2)) < car)
  ;Value: ((78 . value2) (123 . value0) (456 . value1))
  

• Feature New SRFIs supported: 112, 158, 162, 219
• Improvement Improve printing of environments for libraries and programs.
• Improvement Fix C code to compile on newer tool chains.
• Improvement Update Unicode support to UCD 13.0.0.
• Improvement The fix:lsh procedure (to be read as left shift) now computes arithmetic shifts on all platforms. Previously, for negative shift amounts, it would sometimes compute logical right shifts relative to the number of bits in a fixnum. See here for historical details.
• Improvement No part of MIT/GNU Scheme depends on OpenSSL any more.
• Bug fix Dumping a band no longer stores a copy of the process's environment variables.
• Bug fix Fix build with musl libc: work around problem with musl's declaration of environ in unistd.h, which causes gcc -Wredundant-decls warnings to reject the POSIX requirement that users declare extern char **environ.
• Bug fix Microcode stack traces had been broken in the microcode v15 merge in 2007. They now work again, and the C code that abused enums to store pointers, which broke the build with newer compilers, has been fixed to work differently.

Stable release 11.2

• Bug fix Lots of bug fixes, see the changelog for more info.

Stable release 11.1

• Bug fix Installation documentation mistakenly suggested installing automake rather than m4.

Testing release 11.0.91

• Bug fix The quoted-printable encoder correctly produces uppercase hexadecimal digits; a change in the default case of output in digit->char had caused it to erroneously produce lowercase hexadecimal digits in violation of RFC 2045.
• Bug fix In Edwin's inferior-repl mode, use of read was throwing a wrong-number-of-arguments error.
• Bug fix Output from --help option was being sent partly to standard error and standard output; now it is all sent to standard error.
• Bug fix Fix errors when using graphics to display images.
• Bug fix Various pathnames and other information from the build host were being stored in the band (and consequently in releases).
• Bug fix Fixed a number of other small bugs that were reported in the previous release.

Testing release 11.0.90

Changes to the native-code compiler (LIAR)

• Feature MIT Scheme now has native code (and SVM) support on aarch64.
• Performance The AMD x86-64 ABI has been changed.
  • Newer Scheme versions must be cross-compiled from older ones using ./configure --enable-cross-compiling.
  • Old .com files must be recompiled.
  • The changes have performance improvements on many workloads, by reducing the amount of self-modifying code and by making better use of the CPU branch predictor.
• Bug fix A number of bugs on big-endian systems have been fixed:
  • SVM1 byte code interpreter works on big-endian systems now
  • compiler can now cross-compile to big-endian systems
  • fixed wrong byte ordering in MD5 microcode primitive
• Bug fix LIAR previously miscompiled local procedures with optional parameters if they were never passed.

  Formerly MIT Scheme used unassigned reference traps for optional parameters without values; now it uses a #!default object. But LIAR hadn't gotten the memo, and if every call site omitted the argument, LIAR would constant-fold an unassigned reference trap instead of #!default.

  (let ()
    (define (test #!optional x)
      (pp (map-reference-trap (lambda () x))))
    (test))
  

• Feature New procedure (bytevector-zero-explicit! bv [start [end]]) intended not to be optimized away.

  This isn't correctly implemented yet—an old copy of the data may remain elsewhere in memory after a GC—but it may be useful to mark where you would want to zero the bytevector if we fixed it in the future.

• Feature Support for cross-compilation has been improved.

  On your x86 workstation, with mit-scheme-x86-64 in $PATH (requires 10.1.11 or newer):

  cd mit-scheme-X.Y.Z/src
  ./configure \
    --enable-native-code=aarch64le \
    --enable-cross-compiling
  make cross-host
  

  On your aarch64 laptop:

  cd mit-scheme-X.Y.Z/src
  (cd microcode && ./configure)
  make cross-target
  

Changes to the runtime system

• Improvement R7RS library support has been greatly improved since the last release. Many bugs have been fixed, more built-in libraries have been defined, and built-in libraries are automatically loaded as needed.

  The procedure (find-scheme-libraries! directory) can be called to pre-register all of the libraries in directory; once pre-registered, a library is automatically loaded as needed. When Scheme starts, if the directory ${HOME}/.mit-scheme/libraries/ exists, find-scheme-libraries! is called on it.

  Note that there is no relationship between a library file's location and its name. Library files can be organized as desired. In addition, libraries can now be named using the .sld suffix, which has its own special suffixes for compiled code, or you can use .scm as before.

• Feature New pseudorandom number generator algorithm for random API.

  The PRNG algorithm is based on the stream cipher ChaCha. The state is a 32-byte seed s; each output x is obtained by breaking the 64-byte quantity ChaCha_s(0) into two 32-byte halves s′ and x, and replacing the state s by s′.

  The state is a little smaller than the old algorithm, and we now implement random-source-pseudo-randomize! keyed by two 128-bit integer seeds which can safely be drawn from the random source itself to attain reproducible randomized subtrees of computation with no danger of collisions in the seeds.

  (flo:random-unit state)

  is now deprecated: use flo:random-unit-open if you must for essentially the same semantics, but prefer flo:random-unit-closed.

  (flo:random-unit-open state)

  samples from the uniform distribution on real numbers in (2^{emin − p}/2, 1 − 2^p/2) rounded to the nearest floating-point number. Previously, flo:random-unit and random-real were limited to a narrower range and excluded many floating-point numbers in that range.

  (flo:random-unit-closed state)

  samples from the uniform distribution on real numbers in [0, 1] rounded to the nearest floating-point number. Effectively, though, it samples from (0, 1], because the probability of getting 0 is smaller than 2^emin which is negligible even for IEEE 754 binary32 (single-precision) where it is 2⁻¹²⁷, whereas the probability of getting 1 is the small but nonnegligible 2^−p/2, e.g. 2⁻⁵⁴ in binary64. Thus, it is safe to pass the outcome to log, but not safe to pass the outcome to log1p.

  WARNING: The SRFI 27 and old MIT Scheme RNG API are not widely implemented as cryptographic PRNGs, so code written against them can't rely on them to be cryptographically secure in general. Further, anything involving random-integer, random-real, or bignums is likely to be vulnerable to timing attacks. But if you accidentally do use this API to generate cryptographic key material (as SRFI 27 suggests) then you might not be as bad off as you would have been before.

• Feature The rt-tree and wt-tree features are now always loaded, so it's not necessary to call load-option to get them.
• Feature Several new SRFIs are now fully supported: 14 Character-set Library, 115 Scheme Regular Expressions, 124 Ephemerons, 125 Intermediate hash tables, 128 Comparators (reduced), 133 Vector Library (R7RS-compatible), and 143 Fixnums. All supported SRFIs can be imported as (srfi n). Additionally, most of the SRFI definitions are bound in the global environment.
• Feature The REPL now supports a new control interface. It's minimal at the moment but will be expanded in the future. To see the available commands, evaluate ,help at the REPL and/or read the User Manual.
• Several deprecated procedures have been removed:
  • count-matching-items
  • delete-matching-items
  • list-transform-negative
  • keep-matching-items
  • list-transform-positive
  Instead use the SRFI 1 procedures count, remove, and filter, which are the same with different argument ordering.
• Incompatible change When the car of a weak pair is garbage collected, it is now replaced with a unique reclaimed object. Previous releases instead used #f, which made it clumsy to represent #f as an ordinary value in the car. This change will likely break any code explicitly using weak pairs.
• Feature Hash tables now support keys that are weak lists. This allows storing data with multiple keys, and drops the key and value if any element of the key is garbage collected.
• Feature A new associative-map interface provides a consistent interface to associative maps that's independent of their implementation. It provides implementations using hash tables, red/black trees, and alists. See the Reference Manual for details.
• Bug fix Numerous bugs have been fixed in syntax-rules. While it doesn't yet support the full R7RS specification, it appears to be fairly bug-free. Thanks to Arthur Gleckler for pointing out many of these bugs.
• Bug fix The printer procedure now handles multiple back references.
• Bug fix The printer no longer spuriously escapes | in "string notation" or " in |symbol notation|.
• Bug fix MIT Scheme now uses /tmp as the default temporary directory, not /var/tmp.

  /var/tmp is conventionally for temporary files that are persistent across reboot, e.g. vi recovery files, not for temporary files that we have no use for after a reboot.

Changes to arithmetic

A huge amount of work has been done on arithmetic, particularly floating-point arithmetic, by Taylor Campbell.

• Feature New arithmetic procedures:
  • (log1p x) = log (1 + x) for any x in (−1, +∞), −∞ for -1. [The primitive flo:log1p has a range restriction due to the Intel i387 CPU instruction.]
  • (expm1 x) = e^x − 1 for any real x. [The primitive flo:expm1 has a range restriction due to the Intel i387 CPU instruction.]
  • (log1mexp x) = log (1 − e^x), for x < 0
  • (log1pexp x) = log (1 + e^x)
  • (logistic x) = 1/(1 + e^−x), inverse of logit
  • (logit p) = log p/(1 − p), inverse of logistic
  • (log-logistic x) = log 1/(1 + e^−x), inverse of logit-exp
  • (logit-exp t) = log e^t/(1 − e^t), inverse of log-logistic
  • (logit1/2+ p) = (logit (+ 1/2 p)), inverse of logistic-1/2
  • (logistic-1/2 x) = (- (logistic x) 1/2), inverse of logit1/2+
  • (logsumexp (list x y z ...)) = log (e^x + e^y + e^z + ...), guaranteed not to overflow or underflow
  • (copysign m s) returns a real number with the magnitude of m and the sign of s.
  • (modexp b e m) returns b^e mod m.
• Feature New flonum-related definitions:

  flo:radix

  Floating-point radix as an integer. This is essentially always 2 but useful for assertions if you want to future-proof code that assumes it with a noisy failure in case we ever violate the assumption.

  flo:radix.

  Floating-point radix as a flonum.

  flo:precision

  Number of digits in a significand, including the hidden one bit for normal binary floating-point numbers. For binary64 floating-point, this is 53.

  flo:error-bound

  Greatest possible relative error in rounding to nearest.

  flo:log-error-bound

  equal to (log flo:error-bound)

  flo:ulp-of-one

  Distance from 1 to next greater floating-point number. Equal to twice flo:error-bound.

  flo:log-ulp-of-one

  equal to (log flo:ulp-of-one)

  (flo:ulp x)

  Distance from x to the next floating-point number larger in magnitude with the same sign.

  flo:normal-exponent-max

  Exponent of greatest integer power of flo:radix that is a finite floating-point number, as an exact integer. Note that there are floating-point numbers greater than (expt flo:radix. flo:normal-exponent-max)—the greatest one is just below flo:radix times that. But there are none that are a greater integer power of flo:radix.

  flo:normal-exponent-min

  Exponent of least positive integer power of flo:radix that is a normal floating-point number, as an exact integer. (expt flo:radix. flo:normal-exponent-min) is also named flo:smallest-positive-normal.

  flo:subnormal-exponent-min

  Exponent of least positive integer power of flo:radix that is a nonzero, subnormal floating-point number, as an exact integer. (expt flo:radix. flo:subnormal-exponent-min) is the least positive floating-point number, also named flo:smallest-positive-subnormal.

  flo:smallest-positive-subnormal

  Smallest positive subnormal.

  flo:smallest-positive-normal

  Smallest positive normal.

  flo:largest-positive-normal

  Largest positive normal.

  flo:least-subnormal-exponent-base-2

  Least flonum input x for which (expt 2. x) gives a nonzero result.

  flo:least-subnormal-exponent-base-e

  Least flonum input x for which (exp x) gives a nonzero result.

  flo:least-subnormal-exponent-base-10

  Least flonum input x for which (expt 10. x) gives a nonzero result.

  flo:least-normal-exponent-base-2

  Least flonum input x for which (expt 2. x) gives a normal result.

  flo:least-normal-exponent-base-e

  Least flonum input x for which (exp x) gives a normal result.

  flo:least-normal-exponent-base-10

  Least flonum input x for which (expt 10. x) gives a normal result.

  flo:greatest-normal-exponent-base-2

  Greatest flonum input x for which (expt 2. x) gives a finite result.

  flo:greatest-normal-exponent-base-e

  Greatest flonum input x for which (exp x) gives a finite result.

  flo:greatest-normal-exponent-base-10

  Greatest flonum input x for which (expt 10. x) gives a finite result.

  (flo:ldexp x e)

  equal to x * 2^e

  (flo:scalbn x e)

  equal to x * b^e, where b is flo:radix and e is an integer

  (flo:logb y)

  equal to e such that y = x * b^e for x = (flo:scalbn y (- e)), and 1 ≤ x < b, and e is an integer

  (flo:classify x)

  returns one of the symbols

  • zero
  • subnormal
  • normal
  • infinite
  • nan

  (flo:subnormal? x)

  is true if x is subnormal; false if zero, normal, infinite, or NaN

  (flo:safe-zero? x)

  is true if x is zero; false if subnormal, normal, infinite, or NaN. flo:zero? raises an invalid-operation exception on NaN; flo:safe-zero? never does even on signalling NaN.

  (flo:sign-negative? x)

  returns true if x has negative sign, false if x has positive sign. Note that (flo:negative? 0.) and (flo:negative? -0.) both return false, while (flo:sign-negative? -0.) returns true. Also, flo:negative? raises invalid-operation exception on NaN, while flo:sign-negative? never does even on signalling NaN.

  (flo:safe< x y)

  (flo:safe<= x y)

  (flo:safe> x y)

  (flo:safe>= x y)

  (flo:safe= x y)

  (flo:safe<> x y)

  (flo:unordered? x y)

  perform unordered floating-point comparisons and, unlike flo:< &c., do not raise invalid-operation exceptions on quiet NaNs. (However, they do raise invalid-operation exceptions on signalling NaNs.)

  (flo:<> x y)

  returns true if x is less or greater than y, false if equal or unordered, and raises invalid-operation exceptions on any NaNs.

  (flo:total< x y)

  is true if x < y in the total ordering defined in IEEE 754-2008 Sec. 5.10; (flo:total-order x y) is a three-way comparison, −1 if x < y, 0 if x = y, +1 if x > y.

  (flo:total-mag< x y)

  equal to (flo:total< (flo:abs x) (flo:abs y))

  (flo:total-order-mag x y)

  equal to (flo:total-order (flo:abs x) (flo:abs y))

  The eight min/max operations of IEEE 754-2019 are now supported:

  • flo:min
  • flo:max
  • flo:min-mag
  • flo:max-mag
  • flo:min-num
  • flo:max-num
  • flo:min-mag-num
  • flo:max-mag-num

  The -mag variants compare magnitudes. The -num variants treat NaN as missing data—if one operand is numeric and the other is NaN, they return the numeric operand and ignore the NaN, as the minNum/maxNum operations from IEEE 754-2008 did.

  (flo:make-nan negative? quiet? payload)

  returns a NaN with the specified payload, which must not exceed (- (expt 2 flo:significand-digits-base-2 2) 1).

  (flo:nan-quiet? nan)

  returns true for quiet NaNs, false for signalling NaNs.

  (flo:nan-payload nan)

  returns the payload of NaN, an integer between 0 (inclusive) and 2⁵¹ (exclusive).

• Feature Floating-point exceptions are now not trapped by default.

  This follows IEEE 754's semantics for the default mode, and it has been the case on some platforms (e.g, macOS) for some time.

  If you want to trap on (e.g.) invalid-operation, you can do

  (flo:with-exceptions-trapped (flo:exception:invalid-operation)
    (lambda ()
      ...))
  

  (flo:trappable-exceptions) gives the set of all exceptions that can be trapped. Human-readable names are available by (flo:exceptions->names (flo:trappable-exceptions)).

  You can also test for floating-point exceptions after a computation without trapping. Before you can do this for the first time in any thread, you must clear the floating-point exceptions (otherwise there may be residual garbage from past computations):

  (flo:preserving-environment
   (lambda ()
     (flo:clear-exceptions! (flo:supported-exceptions))
     (let ((x (do-big-computation)))
       (if (not (zero? (flo:test-exceptions (flo:exception:underflow))))
           (warn "underflow"))
       x)))
  

• Feature New procedures for floating-point fused-multiply/add:

  (flo:*+ u v a)

  computes u*v + a correctly rounded with no intermediate overflow or underflow

  (flo:fma u v)

  is the same, with a more familiar name

  (flo:fast-fma?)

  returns true if fma is hardware-supported and false if it is emulated in software with Dekker's double-precision algorithm

• Feature Added support for hexadecimal floating-point notation. Example:

  (parameterize ((param:printer-radix #x10))
    (write-to-string (list #x1.5p10 1.5e10 0.1 (flo:nextafter 0.1 1.0))))
  ;Value: "(#x1.5p+10 #x1.bf08ebp+33 #x1.999999999999ap-4 #x1.999999999999bp-4)"
  

• Feature New IEEE 754 procedures:
  • (decompose-ieee754 x base emax precision if-zero if-subnormal if-normal if-infinite if-nan)
  • (decompose-ieee754-binary x exponent-bits precision) -> [sign biased-exponent trailing-significand]
  • (decompose-ieee754-binary32 x) -> [sign biased-exponent trailing-significand]
  • (decompose-ieee754-binary64 x) -> [sign biased-exponent trailing-significand]
  • (decompose-ieee754-binary128 x) -> [sign biased-exponent trailing-significand]
  • (compose-ieee754-binary sign biased-exponent trailing-significand exponent-bits precision) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-binary32 sign biased-exponent trailing-significand) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-binary64 sign biased-exponent trailing-significand) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-binary128 sign biased-exponent trailing-significand) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-zero sign) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-subnormal sign significand base emin precision) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-normal sign exponent significand base emin precision) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-infinity sign) -> real
  • (compose-ieee754-nan sign quiet payload) -> nan
  • (ieee754-binary32-exact? x) -> boolean
  • (ieee754-binary64-exact? x) -> boolean
  • (ieee754-binary128-exact? x) -> boolean
  • (ieee754-binary-hex-string x exponent-bits precision) -> string
  • (ieee754-binary32-hex-string x) -> string
  • (ieee754-binary64-hex-string x) -> string
  • (ieee754-binary128-hex-string x) -> string
• Feature The reader and printer now support notation for all distinct NaNs.

  The sequence is sign type "." payload, where sign is "+" or "-", type is "nan" for quiet NaNs and "snan" for signalling NaNs, and payload is an integer represented in the current radix.

  The notations +snan.0 and -snan.0 are forbidden because the bit pattern they would mean represents +inf.0 and -inf.0 instead.

• Feature The x86-specific floating-point subnormal operand exception is now supported, and can be tested and trapped on x86 systems.
• Bug fix (angle z) now correctly handles edge cases with signed zero.
• Bug fix The <= and >= procedures now return false for NaN inputs; they previously returned true. Additionally, on amd64, all of the numerical comparison routines now raise floating-point exceptions for NaN inputs according to the rules of IEEE 754-2008, which can be tested and can trap. (The new procedures flo:safe<, flo:safe<=, flo:safe>, flo:safe>=, flo:safe=, flo:safe<>, and flo:unordered? avoid exceptions.)

  (The i386 compiler back end does not correctly raise floating-point exceptions, and the C and SVM back ends may or may not depending on your C compiler's IEEE 754-2008 conformance.)

• Bug fix Complex numbers with nonfinite real and imaginary parts can be read and printed in rectangular notation now.
• Bug fix Several bugs were fixed involving signed zero and branch cuts in complex numbers:
  • -0.+i is now correctly parsed as negative zero real part; previously the negative was discarded and it was parsed as positive zero.
  • -0.i is now correctly printed as such, not as +-0.i.
  • (atan -2i) now returns the same result as (atan 0.-2i), not (atan -0.-2i).
• Bug fix Multiplying by purely imaginary numbers preserves zero sign.
  • (* +i (make-rectangular x y)) = (make-rectangular (* -1 y) x)
  • (* (make-rectangular x y) +i) = (make-rectangular (* -1 y) x)
  • (/ (make-rectangular x y) -i) = (make-rectangular (* -1 y) x)
  • (* -1 (make-rectangular x y)) = (make-rectangular y (* -1 x))
  • (* (make-rectangular x y) -i) = (make-rectangular y (* -1 x))
  • (/ (make-rectangular x y) +i) = (make-rectangular y (* -1 x))
• Bug fix abs now always correctly adjusts the sign of a NaN and never raises a floating-point exception, following IEEE 754-2008.
• Bug fix Floating-point primitives now raise floating-point exceptions, rather than signalling argument range errors, and trap (i.e., signal a condition) only if floating-point exceptions are trapped.
• Bug fix (* 0 +inf.0) now returns NaN; previously it returned 0.
• Bug fix The integer? procedure no longer returns true for infinities.

  A side effect of this bug was that the compiler's common subexpression elimination would crash when handling infinities, either written literally or due to constant folding:

  ;  Compiling file: "./floenv.bin" => "./floenv.com"...
  ;The object +inf.0, passed as the first argument to flonum-normalize, is not the correct type.
  

• Bug fix The (magnitude z) procedure no longer overflows with large and angles near odd multiples of π/4.
• Bug fix +nan.0 and -nan.0 are now read as floating-point not-a-number; nan.0 was incorrectly read as that, but is now read as a symbol as it should be.
• Bug fix SF no longer incorrectly transforms (- x) into (- 0 x). This means when x is a floating-point zero, (- x) reliably changes its sign.
• Bug fix (make-polar magnitude 0) now returns magnitude, even if it is infinite or NaN; previously for infinite magnitudes it returned a rectangular number with NaN imaginary part.
• Bug fix Floating-point exceptions now work on PowerPC.
• Bug fix The reader and string->number now reject #e+inf.0, #e+nan.0, &c.

  Infinities and NaNs are not exact numbers and as such there is no way to interpret them with the #e prefix. (The #i prefix still works.)

• Bug fix The microcode is now compiled with -frounding-math so that the rounding mode can be reliably changed (and -fno-builtin-floor to work around a GCC>=7 bug).
• Bug fix The sqrt procedure now correctly propagates NaNs, handles complex numbers with infinities, and raises floating-point exceptions only where appropriate.

Other changes

• With this release we are adopting the version-numbering conventions used by Emacs:
  • Unreleased (HEAD) versions will be labeled x.y-1.50, where x is the next major version, and y is the next minor version. For example, the current HEAD version is 11.0.50, targeting the eventual release 11.1.
  • Pre-release (testing) versions will be labeled x.y-1.90, x.y-1.91, etc.
  • Release (stable) versions will be labeled x.1, x.2, etc. Releases after the .1 version are for bug fixes and small improvements only.
• The release version is now embedded in the executable and library names, making it easier to have several different releases installed at the same time. For example, this release's executable would be stored at /usr/local/bin/mit-scheme-x86-64-11.0.90 while its library would be stored at /usr/local/lib/mit-scheme-x86-64-11.0.90/.

Stable release 10.1.11

This is the final release of 10.1; release 11.1 should be out soon.

Bug fix Fix printing of vectors, which was throwing an error in common circumstances.

Bug fix Fix several issues with syntax-rules. More are known, but they will be fixed in the 11.1 release.

Preparation Make a small tweak to fasdump needed for building the 11.1 release.

Stable release 10.1.10

Feature Multiple values are now slightly more correct than previously. But they are still not entirely compliant with R7RS.

Bug fix Add missing definition to exact to reference manual.

Bug fix Change write to generate datum labels only when there are cycles in the object being printed.

Bug fix HTTP I/O was failing on some cases with an empty body.

Bug fix Textual input from non-blocking ports was getting stuck in an infinite loop.

Bug fix Edwin was communicating with subprocesses using UTF-8 encoding but has no support for this; now it uses ISO 8859-1 instead.

Bug fix Several calls to read-bytevector! were not handling EOF correctly.

Bug fix Interaction between let-syntax and define was incorrect, thinking the defines were in the environment of the let-syntax rather than the environment enclosing it.

Bug fix Typo in parsing of close bracket caused failure in cases when it should have succeeded.

Bug fix Procedures flo:+inf.0 and flo:-inf.0 were being chosen when the distribution binaries were being built. But these procedures are system specific, so are now chosen on the target system.

Performance change symbol<? to compare as UTF-8 bytevector. This makes it different from string<? but much faster, which is more important for symbols.

Stable release 10.1.9

Bug fix Fix botched edit in last release that broke Edwin.

Stable release 10.1.8

This is the "MIT Professors" release, after the two professors who reported the bugs.

Feature When reading Scheme files, the reader now looks for and obeys a "coding" attribute. For example,

;; -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-

tells the reader to use iso-8859-1 coding, rather than the default utf-8 coding. The file attributes line uses the same format that Emacs accepts (multiple attributes separated by semicolons), except that the right-hand side of each attribute will be parsed by read and consequently must be valid Scheme syntax.

Bug fix Make sure that Edwin reads and writes files in iso-8859-1 coding. This is the only coding that Edwin supports since it uses single-byte strings.

Note that there is no way to automatically override the default coding when writing files, other than to use (port/set-coding port coding) on the output port after opening it and before writing to it.

Bug fix Fix a minor bug in IMAIL.

Stable release 10.1.7

Feature Some support for upcoming changes to the ABI and compiler.

Performance More performance improvements for Edwin and IMAIL.

Bug fix More fixes to X11 graphics support.

Bug fix Fix support for UTF-8 encoding of file names.

Stable release 10.1.6

Bug fix Killing Emacs *scheme* buffer was not killing the scheme process.

Bug fix Fix printing of string slices.

Performance Minor tweak to character sets in Edwin regexps.

Stable release 10.1.5

Bug fix Fix problems from X11 graphics support.

Bug fix Top-level definition should return the name when evaluated.

Feature Change param:reader-fold-case? to be settable.

Stable release 10.1.4

Bug fix Fix problem where Scheme crashes when running under Emacs using --emacs.

Bug fix Fix breakage that caused legacy make-hash-table to throw an exception.

Feature Implement position option for textual ports, export binary-port-position,set-binary-port-position!, and binary-port-length, and fix bug in position of binary output ports.

Feature Allow use of bundle? as a bundle predicate. Also allow #f to be passed, meaning the same thing.

Feature New printer parameter param:print-hash-number-in-objects? controls whether objects with #[...] printed representation will contain the hash number for the object. By default, it's true so there's no change in behavior.

Performance Speed up string operations for Edwin and IMAIL. These changes should provide noticeable improvements.

Performance Don't use general predicate relations for record predicates; there's no advantage, and it's far slower than just chasing the parent link.

Stable release 10.1.3

Revise unix installation notes to be more specific.

A bunch of changes to smooth the process of installation.

Bug fix make flo:integer? answer true only for finite inputs.

Stable release 10.1.2

Bug fix x11 plugin wasn't being recompiled when installing from native distribution.

Stable release 10.1.1

Bug fix Fix problem that required a working mit-scheme when building and installing one of the distributed native builds.

Stable release 10.1

This release has a few high-level changes in addition to those detailed below:

• We aren't distributing any binaries for Windows systems. The reason for this is that the 32-bit versions we've made in the past are nearly unusable in modern Windows systems, and there's a fair amount of work to get a 64-bit version that none of the current maintainers is interested in doing.
• We're distributing only 64-bit binaries for macOS systems because the toolchain in recent releases has deprecated 32-bit support.
• The portable C version is not included in this release because we were unable to get it working in time.
• Finally, we hope to have a new point release relatively soon, since there is a long list of minor cleanups that are needed; it was felt that getting a release out was more important than making it perfect.

Major new features

• R7RS! Most of R7RS is now supported, with some exceptions:
  • Libraries don't autoload yet; this will be added in the next release.
  • Multiple-value returns are usable only in restricted ways. This can't be fixed without significant compiler work, which probably won't happen.

  Note that one of the new features of R7RS is parameters, which provide a portable way to do dynamic binding. As of this release, the use of fluid-let is deprecated; it will be removed entirely in a future release.

  Also note that the REPL has not changed its behavior. That's also true of the loader and the compiler, but these automatically detect when a file contains R7RS code and treats it appropriately. These changes allow existing code to continue working while new code can be written.

• Support for Unicode:
  • NFC and NFD normalization is supported; most strings are NFC.
  • Conversions between strings and UTF-{8,16,32} bytevectors are supported.
  • Symbols, the reader, the printer, and textual ports all support Unicode.
  • Character sets now support Unicode, and have been significantly tuned for space, using an inversion list.
  • New regsexp regular-expression matcher supports Unicode.
  • The old regular-expression matcher and rexp do not.
  • Edwin does not support Unicode.
• A foreign function interface has been added to support dynamic loading of C libraries and communicating with them from Scheme. This interface has been used to replace many of the formerly hand-written interfaces to various libraries, and these are now available as plugins.
• A virtual machine, svm, has been implemented and is supported as a "native code" target for building. Although fairly slow compared to native code, it has the advantage of working on any architecture. In this release we provide a 64-bit version. We're not currently providing a 32-bit version, but it can be built if needed.

SMP support

Preliminary support for symmetric multi-processing has been added, though the core functionality remains on an alternate branch. A multi-processing Scheme cannot rely on without-interrupts for exclusive, atomic access to the entire system. Thus without-interrupts is deprecated. Many of the system's uses of without-interrupts sought only to avoid interruption of a set of data structure modifications that would leave the data in an inconsistent state. These applications of without-interrupts were replaced with applications of a new procedure: without-interruption. Users of subprocess-global-status-tick and subprocess-status-tick relied on without-interrupts to ensure a subprocess could not change status between examining the tick and blocking to wait for a tick. Without without-interrupts, these users needed another mechanism to reliably block for subprocess status changes. The IO system already does this for IO using thread events, so a procedure similar to register-io-thread-event was added: register-subprocess-event.

GC Notifications

GC notifications previously ran in the after-gc interrupt handler, in whatever thread took the GC trap, or no thread at all if the thread system trapped. Unfortunately the notification procedure wants to write to a thread's dynamically bound current output port. Edwin uses this to re-direct the GC notices to its *scheme* buffer. When the thread system trapped, a random thread's (but often the only thread's) dynamic state was used to get a current output port. In anticipation of more finely threaded (and multi-processing) worlds, all of the surprising behavior was taken out of GC notifications. Interested threads are required to register and each runs a thread event soon after the flip (like an interrupt).

Thread Events

• The definition of block-on-io-descriptor outlines the thread event driven process underlying Scheme's multi-tasking IO. The same process can be employed to reliably block on multiple event sources. Note that without-interrupts is not needed, and was replaced by with-thread-events-blocked.

  (let ((state)) ; registration ids, flags shared with event handlers
    (dynamic-wind
     (lambda ()
       (set! state (register-multiple-thread-events)))
     (lambda ()
       (with-thread-events-blocked
        (lambda ()
          (if (wait? state)
              (suspend-current-thread)))))
     (lambda ()
       (deregister-multiple-thread-events state))))
  

• The suspend-current-thread procedure was changed to put the thread back into an event-blocking state when it returns, as is customary for such procedures, allowing an atomic examination of the state after unblocking.
• The run-shell-command procedure now takes advantage of the ability to block on two IO channels and a subprocess status. The procedure can do fully asynchronous IO to/from the subprocess and, with output flushing, acts more like a subshell.

Minor new features

• Changes to plugins:
  • A new command line option, --prepend-library, is convenient for testing a plugin before installing it.
  • The plugins now use libtool.
  • Plugin package installation scripts can use procedures provided by the C/FFI to install their code and documentation. The latter can be added to compressed or uncompressed Info and HTML indices.
• New library: condition variables ((mostly?) compatible with SRFI 18)
  • (make-condition-variable #!optional name) -> condvar
  • (condition-variable-name condvar) -> name
  • (condition-variable-specific condvar) -> object
  • (condition-variable-specific-set! condvar object)
  • (unlock-thread-mutex-and-wait thread-mutex condvar #!optional timeout-ms)
  • (condition-variable-wait! condvar thread-mutex #!optional timeout-ms)
  • (condition-variable-signal! condvar)
  • (condition-variable-broadcast! condvar)
• New library: thread barriers
  • (make-thread-barrier count #!optional name) -> thread-barrier
  • (thread-barrier-wait thread-barrier)
• New nonrecursive with-thread-mutex-lock; with-thread-mutex-locked is deprecated.
• New float functions:
  • (flo:copysign magnitude sign)
  • (flo:nextafter x)
  • (flo:sinh x)
  • (flo:cosh x)
  • (flo:tanh x)
  • (flo:asinh x)
  • (flo:acosh x)
  • (flo:atanh x)
  • (flo:cbrt x)
  • (flo:erf x)
  • (flo:erfc x)
  • (flo:gamma x)
  • (flo:hypot x)
  • (flo:j0 x)
  • (flo:j1 x)
  • (flo:y0 x)
  • (flo:y1 x)
  • (flo:yn x)
• New procedure (reference-barrier x) guarantees x is not GC'd yet.
• New integer bit functions:
  • (ffs x): find first set, 1-indexed with 0 for 0
  • (fls x): find last set, 1-indexed with 0 for 0 (same as integer-length)
  • (ctz x): count trailing zeros (same as ffs)
  • ((clz n) x): count leading zeros in n-bit word x
• New library: SHA-3
  • (sha3256) -> sha3
  • (sha3256-update sha3 buf start end)
  • (sha3256-final sha3) -> digest

Minor changes and bug fixes

• Fixed weight-balanced tree balance
• The SIGFPE handler was fixed so that it does not force a GC flip after every signal raised outside compiled code (e.g. in libm).
• The load-noisily? variable was removed. It has been ignored for at least 10 years.
• The with-thread-mutex-try-lock procedure was added for the use of GC daemons that clean a serialized data structure. They may run when a mutex is locked, cannot deadlock, and can afford to punt.
• The C/FFI now handles struct/union return values like pointer return values.
• Edwin/X no longer busy-waits for the next command key. The peek-no-hang input operation takes a timeout argument allowing it to wait rather than return immediately.
• The Edwin/X display type uses thread events (e.g. the new register-subprocess-event procedure) to reliably block without missing a subprocess status change, nor any other event on its many input sources.
• A world-report procedure and a monitor-world Edwin command were added.
• The open-unix-server-socket, unix-server-connection-accept, and close-unix-server-socket procedures were added.
• A spawn-edwin procedure makes it convenient to use both an Edwin on X and a REPL on the console.
• The new procedure register-time-event is analogous to register-timer-event but takes a real time instead of an interval, simplifying the effort to meet a deadline.
• The cross-reference analyzer (CREF) now supports deprecated exports, declared with an export-deprecated keyword rather than export. References to the exported bindings are noted in the analyses.
• Threads can be given properties using thread-get and thread-put!. Threads can be given 'name properties and world-report will display their names. The create-thread procedure (like SRFI 18's make-thread) now takes an optional name argument.
• The FFI accepts legacy strings but returns unicode strings (or, if it encounters non-ASCII characters, bytevectors).

Incompatible changes

• Most strings are now immutable! Nearly all ways of creating strings now produce immutable strings, with the exception of make-string and string-copy. Immutability provides a number of useful features, the most important being that space-efficient representations can be used. See the reference manual for full details.
• The procedure hash has been changed to be compatible with SRFI 69. Previously it was similar to object-hash, which should be used in its place now.
• The vector-8b procedures, which used to provide a way to access strings as vectors of bytes, are now deprecated. They don't work with the new string representation. Instead please use bytevectors for this purpose.
• The URI accessor procedures no longer accept strings as arguments. Use ->uri to convert a string to a URI prior to using them.
• The older support for Unicode encoding forms has been removed. Please change your code to use the new bytevector converters. However, for many purposes, it is no longer necessary to handle Unicode specially since it's built in everywhere.

Experimental new features

• The URI type has a new syntax: #<...>. Both the reader and the printer work with this syntax.

Stable release 9.2

Stable release 9.1

Incompatible changes

• Some declarations are no more:

  automagic-integrations
  eta-substitution
  integrate-safely
  open-block-optimizations
  

Major new features

• Ephemerons and the full range of hash table weakness options

Experimental new features

• Control of the IEEE 754 floating-point environment
• Interface to C libraries, and a Gtk+ binding
• Rudimentary statistical profiling
• Self-evaluating keyword type and notation
• Swank support, somewhat flaky at the moment

Major changes

• 64-bit times and file offsets are mostly handled now.
• A 20-year-old register allocator bug has been fixed.
• Much of SF has been rewritten and some internal features removed.
• Overall speed of compiled i386/x86-64 code has improved by better branches.
• Primitives doing multiple allocations are less likely to wedge the GC.
• Symbols can now be garbage-collected.
• The syntax expander has been extensively modified which should fix many bugs.
• The support for customizing write and pp has been completely revamped. The new mechanism identifies a set of objects by a universal predicate (that is, a procedure that accepts any object and returns a boolean value), which is completely general and does not depend on details of the object's representation.

Minor new features

• Syntax begin0
• Procedures flo:expm1, flo:logp1
• Integer division operators
• Declaration ignorable
• Procedure ((constant-procedure x) args ...) = x
• Procedure (reference-barrier x) for wrangling weakness
• Operations on two's-complement representation of general integers
• Unicode support in the char-set abstraction, deprecating alphabets
• Unparser methods for entities

Minor changes and bug fixes

• A number of obscure bugs have been fixed.
• IMAIL is a little faster.
• Negative (eastern hemisphere) time zones should work now.
• Some archaic parts of the microcode have been garbage-collected.
• Many bugs and race conditions in subprocesses have been eliminated.
• Scheme handles failure of the close(2) system call correctly now.
• Scheme's stack is now marked non-executable.
• Termcap library selection is a little more robust.
• The build system is a little more robust to interruption.
• Trap handling and recovery is a little more robust.
• We now do a little more automatic testing.
• Wt-tree balancing has been fixed.
• scheme --batch-mode no longer messes with the tty modes.
• X11 support is now dynamically loadable, not a compile-time option.

Stable release 9.0

(Note that we're skipping the 8.x version numbers because long ago there was an 8.x series that we never released.)

In the past my (Chris Hanson's) policy for a stable release was that the documentation had to be updated for the release before it went out. In practice, this has meant that there have been no stable releases in recent years. As of this release, we will no longer consider updated documentation a prerequisite for a stable release.

Major changes

• The compiler has been ported to the x86-64 architecture, allowing Scheme programs to take advantage of very large address spaces and improved performance (due to additional registers) on that architecture.
• The compiler's C back end has been resurrected, allowing the system to be run on most computer architectures (under unix-like systems only).
• A new virtual machine has been designed and partially implemented. When finished, it will provide additional system portability.
• The system now runs on OS X with native-code compilation.
• The empty list and #f are now distinct objects.
• The garbage collector has been completely rewritten. The new design uses a single heap and a temporary memory region, which doubles the largest available heap space. The now-unavailable bchscheme was similar except that its temporary region was a file.
• There's new support for HTTP messages, and a simple HTTP client. Unfortunately none of this is yet documented.

Incompatibilities with previous releases

• Support for SRFI 1 has forced a change in the behavior of the procedure reduce; code using the old reduce should adapt to the new behavior, or use reduce-left which implements the old behavior.
• The procedure record-type-default-inits now returns a list, not a vector.
• The load-noisily and load-latest procedures are now just aliases for load.

System usage changes

• The default configuration has been changed to reflect modern usage. Many command-line options and environment variables have been eliminated or are ignored. Specifically:
  • The all.com band is now used by default, meaning that the compiler and Edwin are both loaded. In order to use the smaller runtime.com band, it must be explicitly specified with the --band option. The --compiler and --edwin options are now accepted but ignored. The env vars MITSCHEME_COMPILER_BAND, MITSCHEME_EDWIN_BAND, and MITSCHEME_ALL_BAND are now ignored.
  • The default heap size is now set at 4 megawords, much larger than our previous large size, and adequate for general use.
  • The --large option is now ignored, and all difference between large and small memory sizes is eliminated. The old MITSCHEME_LARGE_foo and MITSCHEME_SMALL_foo environment variables are ignored, replaced by two new vars MITSCHEME_HEAP_SIZE and MITSCHEME_STACK_SIZE. (There's no var for constant size since it's rarely necessary to specify it.)
• The compiler now generates type and range checks by default, in order to make compiled code more robust. The runtime system is now compiled this way as well. New declarations (no-type-checks) and (no-range-checks) allow these defaults to be overridden. This change will cause some performance degredation; we're interested in hearing about situations in which this is a significant problem.
• The compiler's verbosity has been significantly reduced.
• The system will now run on Windows XP SP2 when the no-execute permissions are enabled.
• Platform support for Cygwin has been added. This was a donation and hasn't been tested by us.
• The file specified by environment variable MITSCHEME_LOAD_OPTIONS is now considered optional rather than required.
• The --eval and --load command-line options have been changed so that their actions are queued to be evaluated by the REPL rather than being processed outside of the REPL context. This fixes various problems with the use of these options.
• Several problems have been fixed in the use of modifier keys under Windows and X11.

Changes to the runtime

• Defaulted optional arguments have a new value that is a self-evaluating constant. Previously such arguments were filled with a value that made them "unassigned".
• cond-expand now recognizes mit and mit/gnu as features, to assist porting programs.
• The URL support has been replaced by a new implementation of URIs.
• Basic support for mapping of pathnames to MIME types has been added.
• There is new syntax for expression comments: #;(+ 3 4).
• There is now support for access to the registry on Windows systems.
• The low-level Unicode support has been completely rewritten:
  • We now support UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32.
  • There's a new character #\bom.
  • Parser buffers now deal with wide characters.
• The port abstraction has been completely rewritten to support character coding and a wider variety of line endings.
  • There's a new operation to unread a character.
  • Port encapsulation has been eliminated.
  • discard-char is now an alias for read-char.
  • open-tcp-stream-socket now takes only two arguments.
• Hash tables have been reimplemented for improved speed. In the process some less useful operations were removed. There are new procedures make-strong-eq-hash-table and make-strong-eqv-hash-table.
• The new procedure symbol provides an easy way to build new (interned) symbols.
• A new quoting syntax for symbols simplifies writing arbitrary symbols.
• The new procedures smallest-fixnum and largest-fixnum provide the limits on the fixnum representation.
• The new procedure channel-file-truncate can truncate an open file.
• Symbol names are now encoded in UTF-8. string->symbol accepts an ISO 8859-1 string and converts it, while symbol->string returns an ISO 8859-1 string (or signals an error if conversion impossible). New procedures utf8-string->symbol and symbol->utf8-string provide support for UTF-8 strings.
• string->number now accepts an optional argument; if given and true, and the input string isn't a number's representation, an error is signalled.
• The read procedure now accepts an optional second argument, an environment in which to look up control variables such as *parser-radix*. This allows these variables to be scoped rather than dynamically bound, which in turn makes them much safer to use. Numerous callers of read have been changed to pass an appropriate environment here.
• There are new procedures flo:rounding-modes, flo:rounding-mode, flo:set-rounding-mode!, and flo:with-rounding-mode that provide control over the floating-point rounding mode on systems that support it. Currently this is known to work on recent versions of GNU/Linux and OS X.
• The random-number generator has been changed to provide reasonable output for large moduli. The previous implementation limited the amount of randomness in that case.
• SRFIs 1, 2, 27, and 69 have been implemented.
  • The procedure random-source-pseudo-randomize! from SRFI 27 has not been implemented. While I agree that this could be useful, it effectively mandates a particular PRNG, and I don't want to be forced to use it.
  • The procedure hash from SRFI 69 has not been implemented, as it's a name conflict with a pre-existing procedure.
• There is now partial support for ISO 8601 date/time strings.
• There is now basic support for RDF and Turtle.
• There is now support for server-side programming using Apache and mod_lisp.
• There's new support for parsing compound data structures, similar to the *parser support for parsing character streams. This isn't yet documented.

Improved XML support

• xml-element-content has been renamed to xml-element-contents.
• Character data can now be provided in several different forms.
• We now support UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, and all ISO 8859 character sets.
• We now support XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1, including convenience procedures for building documents.
• We now support XML-RPC.
• XML element attributes now have an opaque representation; previously they were pairs. Also, the attribute values are now guaranteed to be strings; unresolved entity references are no longer supported.
• The XML naming support has been rewritten, to rationalize the code and bring our terminology into line with W3C.

Changes to Edwin

• Edwin buffers are now allocated as external strings, which allows buffers to be as large as 32 MiB each.
• New parenthesis-editing minor mode M-x paredit-mode.
• Support for Lisppaste.

Changes to IMAIL

• IMAIL has improved sorting that works much better on large folders.
• IMAIL can now parse MIME in any folder, not just in IMAP folders.

Testing release 7.7.90

As of this release, MIT Scheme is a part of the GNU project and has been renamed MIT/GNU Scheme. The project is now hosted on Savannah. License text in the source files has been changed, and a license/warranty statement is now emitted during boot, to conform to the GNU coding standards.

This is the first testing release of MIT/GNU Scheme. I had originally planned to do a stable 7.8.0 release, but time pressures have made it difficult to bring the documentation up to date, so this release comes with out-of-date documentation. Additionally, there will be binaries only for GNU/Linux; users of other systems will have to wait for the stable release.

Incompatibilities with previous releases

• In releases 7.7.0 and 7.7.1, variable definitions (i.e. instances of the define special form) appearing inside let-syntax modified the environment outside of the let-syntax, while syntax definitions (instances of the define-syntax special form) modified the environment corresponding to the let-syntax form. However, according to R5RS this is incorrect: all definitions should modify the environment corresponding to the let-syntax form. The syntax has been changed to conform to R5RS.

• The record abstraction has received a major update. The primary purpose of this update has been to improve the performance of constructors, and to implement keyword constructors for records. As a consequence, the representation of record types has been changed. Because record types are constructed at load time, this has no effect on previously-compiled code.

  However, the define-structure macro was also changed to use these new facilities. The interface between define-structure and the record abstraction was changed to increase performance, and consequently previously-compiled instances of define-structure no longer work and must be recompiled.

  A further change to define-structure is that the initial-value expressions are interpreted in a different way. Previously, an undocumented feature of these expressions was that they could refer to other supplied record field names as free variables. This no longer works; instead these expressions are closed in the environment in which the define-structure macro appears.

  The default type-descriptor name for define-structure has changed. Previously, for a structure defined as

  (define-structure foo bar)
  

  the type descriptor was named foo. Now, the type descriptor is named rtd:foo. This change is useful primarily because it is common to name variables that hold objects of this type foo, and when the type descriptor has the same name, it causes confusion between references to the descriptor and unintended free references to an object. (After making this change, several such free references were found in the MIT/GNU Scheme code.)

  Finally, define-structure now defines a type descriptor for every structure definition, including structures without tags. Previously this was done only for tagged structures.

• The representation of character objects has been changed to provide direct support for Unicode. Previously, the representation had 16 bits of code and 5 bucky bits. The new representation has 21 bits of code and 4 bucky bits (the "top" bucky bit has been eliminated). This allows direct representation of the entire Unicode space.

  In addition, the syntax of characters has been extended to allow arbitrary Unicode characters to be represented. The new syntax is #\U+XXXX, where XXXX is a sequence of hexadecimal digits specifying a Unicode code point. This supersedes an undocumented syntax #\<codeXXXX>.

• The runtime library's support for Unicode has been completely rewritten, and now has support for UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 encodings, as well as support for wide strings. The UTF-8 codec has been fixed to signal errors for overlong coding sequences.

• The special form define-syntax has been changed so that the right-hand side may be a keyword. This can be used to make aliases for existing keywords, such as

  (define-syntax sequence begin)
  

• In pre-7.7 versions of MIT/GNU Scheme, the right-hand side of the special form define-syntax was a procedure, such as

  (define-syntax foo (lambda ...))
  

  This behavior was preserved in the 7.7 versions by a kludge that made the above equivalent to

  (define-syntax foo
    (non-hygienic-macro-transformer
     (lambda ...)))
  

  With this release, the old syntax has been eliminated. It is now necessary to use the non-hygienic-macro-transformer special form in these cases. (Note, however, that non-hygienic-macro-transformer is also a kludge and is not guaranteed to produce working macros. You should rewrite your macros in hygienic form to guarantee proper operation.)

• Command-line options now start with -- rather than -, again for compliance with GNU coding standards. The older - prefix still works but may eventually be dropped.

• The external representation of symbols has been extended to support the quoting mechanisms of Common Lisp. This means that there is a standard external representation for every interned symbol. For example, the notations |abcDEF|, foo|BAR|baz, and abc\ def respectively represent the symbols whose names are "abcDEF", "fooBARbaz", and "abc def".

  This change introduces an incompatibility in the way that symbols are printed. Previously, (write symbol) was equivalent to (write-string (symbol->string symbol)). Now, (write symbol) always writes the symbol out with appropriate quoting so that it will read back in as the same symbol.

Changes to the runtime system

• A new command-line option --batch-mode disables output of banners, prompts, and values. This is intended for use with shell scripts, where the Scheme program writes to standard output and the author doesn't want the output cluttered by the interactivity cues. Note that the effect of this option applies only to the top-level REPL; if an error occurs, all the interactivity cues are re-enabled in the error REPL.

• The following SRFIs are now supported: 0, 6, 8, 9, 23, and 30.

• The following newly-implemented procedures are notable:

  exact-positive-integer?
  host-big-endian?
  make-top-level-environment
  x-graphics/open-display?
  x-graphics/open-window?
  

• The tcp-server-connection-accept procedure now accepts an optional argument line-translation, which sets the line translation to be used for newly-accepted sockets. (Thanks to Arthur Gleckler)

• Output ports now track the current column. This is simple minded but should work for ASCII, at least.

• The URI support procedures, formerly a part of IMAIL, are now in the runtime library.

Changes to Edwin

• HTML mode is now used for ".xml" files, and PHP mode for ".inc" files.

• VC mode has a new editor variable vc-cvs-stay-local that implements a small subset of the corresponding functionality in GNU Emacs.

• The debug-on-*-error editor variables can now be set to 'ask, which causes the user to be prompted for the debugger when the corresponding error occurs. The default settings of these variables have been changed to be more appropriate for typical users.

Changes to XML support

• Support for XML namespaces has been implemented. One consequence of this is that the representation of XML names has been changed. It is no longer the case that XML names can be compared with eq?; instead one must use the new xml-name=?. Additionally, xml-intern now takes an optional second argument, which is the URI of the namespace. XML names that don't have an associated namespace URI are now ordinary interned symbols, which greatly simplifies reference to such names.

• Comments are preserved by the parser.

• The parser now distinguishes between <foo></foo> and <foo/> in its output. The former has a contents list of (""), while the latter has a contents list of ().

• Optional indentation is supported for DTD and attributes during output.

• The parser now supports handlers for processing instructions, which are invoked during parsing. A handler maps the text of a processing instruction to a list of XML items, which are inserted into the resulting XML structure in place of the processing instruction.

• The following new procedures are available to make XML input and output more convenient:

  read-xml
  read-xml-file
  write-xml-file
  string->xml
  substring->xml
  xml->string
  xml->wide-string
  

• All the remaining bugs identified by the XML conformance tests have been fixed, except support for UTF-16.

Stable release 7.7.1

Release 7.7.1 fixes several bugs in IMAIL; fixes a bug that prevented the use of server sockets on Windows systems; and fixes a bug that caused the debugger to generate errors in common circumstances.

Stable release 7.7.0

This release provides hygienic macro support, as defined in R4RS and R5RS. This is a complete rewrite of the syntax engine, so any program that uses macros should be rewritten to use the new engine. A subset of the old macro-definition syntax is still supported, but this will eventually be removed. Note that the new syntax engine has no effect on the compiled-code format; most binaries compiled by release 7.6.x should continue to work.

User-visible consequences to this change

• These syntactic keywords have been eliminated:

  define-macro
  in-package
  macro
  make-environment
  scode-quote
  sequence
  unassigned?
  using-syntax
  

• The syntactic keyword the-environment has been restricted to use in top-level environments. It is no longer allowed in the body of any binding form (e.g. lambda, let).

• Syntactic keywords are now stored in environments, rather than in a separate syntax-table structure. The environment abstraction has been enhanced to support this, as well as to make it more general. The changes are documented in the reference manual.

• The syntax-table abstraction has been eliminated, and most procedures and arguments involving syntax tables have been removed. One exception is the load procedure, which still accepts a syntax-table argument, but ignores it.

Other notable changes in this release

• Although the 7.6.1 release had a workaround for problems with certain AMD Athlon processors, the workaround was ineffective on machines running Windows operating systems (and possibly OS/2 systems as well). This version fixes that problem.

  The hash-table abstraction is now always loaded. It's not necessary to call load-option prior to use of hash tables. For upwards compatibility, calling (load-option 'hash-table) is still permitted but does nothing.

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Updated: 2023-03-14T00:11:13-04