SML/NJ 110.64 NEWS

Standard ML of New Jersey
Version 110.64 NEWS
May 31, 2007

SML/NJ HOME:
  `http://www.smlnj.org/index.html`
FILES:
  `http://smlnj.cs.uchicago.edu/dist/working/110.64/`

### Summary:

Many of the changes affect FLINT and its interaction with the front end, and particularly the system for supporting primops (primitive operations). Additional bugs have been fixed, and ml-lpt as well as AMD64 support have been updated.

### Details:

Front End and FLINT:
  - Implemented a new scheme for defining primops and tracking and analyzing their types in the type checker and in FLINT. Improved the way that the type checker captures type information used by the translate phase to calculate FLINT types.
  - Improved signature printing by making it faithfully reflect the original order of specifications or (for inferred signatures) definitions.
  - First phase of streamlining the type system of the plambda and flint intermediate languages.
  - Fixed some bugs in the type checker and module system.
  - Infinite loop in FLINT (`tests/typing/tests/25.sml`) (fix by Stefan Monnier).
  - Implemented integer and word division operations (div, mod, rem, quot) with an explicit test for zero division. This fixes several previously open bugs related to the treatment of divide-by-zero errors.
SML Basis library:
  - Fixed a bug in the implementation of order operations and min and max for Int32. Fixed several other bugs in the Basis that were revealed by running the regression tests.
  - A number of fixes related to the formatting of dates. These include fixes for bugs #1415 and #1416. We also now correctly handle format characters that lie outside the specified set.
  - Timer.cpu_timer, etc. type printing corrected (by making Timer have opaque sig constraint in `basis/Implementation/timer.sml`)
  - Added missing `toLarge`/`fromLarge` operations to `Word`N modules.
  - Added missing `InvalidArc` to `OS.Path`.
  - Fixed bug in printing negative time values.
  - `Char.fromString` now handles the `\u`xxxx escape sequence.
CM:
  - Added a boolean control named cm.tolerate-tool-failures (env. variable name: CM_TOLERATE_TOOL_FAILURES). The default is false and makes CM fail if a shell tool reports a non-success exit status. If the control is set to true, then CM will press on after tool failures in the event that all target files exist (even when some of them are considered outdated). Turning the control to true can be useful for bootstrapping.
  - Changed the installation mechanism for CM tool plugins. These are just libaries and now get installed like ordinary libaries.
    There are now a number of new installation targets that give some fine-grain control over what classes and suffixes are known, and what they will map to. See config/targets for details.
    The code that caused plugin installation as part of running a tool's "build" script has been removed. (The build script is for building, not for installing.)
SML/NJ Library
  - Added `next` function to `Fifo` and `Queue` modules.
ml-lpt:
  - The name of several ml-lpt-lib modules has changed:

        	  Repair	=> AntlrRepair
        	  StreamPos	=> AntlrStreamPos
        	  ErrHandlerFn	=> AntlrErrHandler
        	  EBNF		=> AntlrEBNF

  - The ml-antlr specification format has changed: declarations such as %tokens and nonterminal definitions can occur *multiple* times in the same specification. The semantics are such that each new declaration extends the previous ones. This does not apply to %start or %name, of course.
  - Importing a grammar via %import now includes all declarations in from the imported grammar, except for %name, %entry, and %start. Tokens and nonterminals can be dropped using the new %dropping clause of the %import directive; the separate %drop and %extend have been removed.
  - We now allow optional type annotations on nonterminals, using the %nonterms directive as in ml-yacc.
  - The refcell construct is now implemented using SML's regular reference cells, so the :== and !! notation has been deprecated.
  - The ml-antlr tool now does much more checking of specifications, and its error messages have been greatly improved. Error repair for generated parsers has been completely rewritten, and is now both much faster and more accurate.
  - ml-ulex is now more lenient with escape codes (non-SML-standard escape codes are now interpreted literally, so e.g. \| denotes "|"). Also, character classes may now include a "-" character at the beginning as is standard in most other regexp tools.
  - All of these changes are documented in the user guide, which has been updated and improved.
AMD64 support:
  - Added the new MLRISC code generator for the AMD64. This version, in contrast to the previous one, uses SSE registers and instructions for all floating-point computations.
  - Added FSQRT instructions for the AMD64 code generator.
Regression Tests:
  - Revised the regression test suite and brought the tests and reference outputs up to date. Added a few new tests. Cleaned up the test scripts.