Lard Version 2.0.12 Release Notes

LARD is now being maintained by the team of:

• Peter Riocreux - Thread state display, new configuration mechanism, command line arguments to the lard code
• W. John Bainbridge - Channel display and debugging improvements
• Andrew Bardsley - Arbitrary precision integer support, new value display format format

There are *major* changes in this version.

Firstly the change in version numbers. No longer will small changes in LARD incur a whole number increase in version number. This release is the first under the new team and is the first of the LARD 2.0 releases. The 12 in the patch level reflects it's notional version number in the old scheme: v12. The version number in bcode files will still follow the old numbering scheme so 2.0.12 uses bcode version 12. Future LARD releases may still use bcode version 12 until and unless the bcode format or the standard libraries change enough to make it worth going to version 13.

Upgrading from version 11

Existing local users will need to

• Change your .profile. All you need to change this time is the version number in LARDHOME. You should end up with something like this:

  	LARDHOME=/home/amulinks/lard/2.0.12
  	BINFMT=`$LARDHOME/config/binfmt`
  	export LCD_OPTS="-lio -lchannels -ltime"
  	export PATH=$LARDHOME/bin/$BINFMT:$PATH
  

  As before, if you want to run the Linux and/or Solaris versions you'll also need to ensure that the following directories are in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH:
  • For Linux: /home/amulinks/lard/tcl/linux/lib
  • For Solaris: /home/amulinks/lard/tcl/sun5/lib, /usr/common/lib

• Recompile all existing programs.

Changes since version 11

• GNU automake/autoconf configuration

  LARD should be more portable and easier to install. Unfortunately LARD still only works correctly on machines with 32 bit architectures. (sizeof (int) == 4 && sizeof (void *) == 4)

• Improved tviewps module

  I have improved the functionality of the tviewps (plot) module. You can now specify a scale factor, and if you have more traces than will fit on the page the plot will be broken into multiple slices.

• Command line arguments to the lard code

  You can now pass arguments to the lard code itself from the li command line. Simply append the arguments to the command line, separated from arguments to the li binary by the argument --end.

• Assorted bug fixes

Known Bugs

• There can be class checking problems when using an expression in the class of a declaration, for example v:var(int^(a+1)). The problem hasn't been thoroughly investigated, but is seems that it can be made to go away using an explicit eval, for example v:var(int^(eval(a+1))).

• If a recursive function's return type depends on its parameters (explicit or implicit), things will go wrong. For example, compiling the following program fails to terminate:

  (foo(T:type):expr(T)=foo(T)).null

• Multi-dimensional array declarations work "backwards", for example if I declare V:var(int^100^200) then the highest numbered element of V is V[199][99], not V[99][199] as you would have expected.

• If a channel's receiver has no delay in its ?() expression then other processes that are watching the channel using wait_until(chan_ready()) may "miss" any activity on the channel. This needs a mechanism like VHDL's delta timing model in order to get the correct behaviour.

• Bad things sometimes happen when a parameterised type declaration contains a record declaration with a field type using the parameter. This can sometimes generate bad code; under some conditions it will pick up the wrong actual value of the parameter and give a run-time error.