Lard Version 9 Release Notes

Upgrading from version 8

• If your environment variables were set up as described in the v6 release notes all you need to change is LARDHOME:

  	LARDHOME=/home/amulinks/lard/v9
  

• Recompile all existing programs.

Changes since version 8

• foreach loop

  LARD now has a foreach loop to itterate over each element of an array. Here's an example:

  	A:var(int^10).
  	v:var(int).
  	A:=[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9];
  	foreach v in A do (
  	  print(v)
  	)
  

• Profiling and Coverage

  The profiling and coverage testing facilities, which stopped working a few versions ago, now work again.

• Improved support for messages

  The msg command and the associated msg module provide a convenient way for your program to output diagnostic and other messages.

• Keyboard Shortcuts

  Many menu commands can now be activated with keyboard shortcuts. This has been implemented using the standard tk mechanism. Underlined characters in menu buttons and menu entries indicate which key should be pressed along with ALT to activate it. Note that ALT really means ALT, not META.

• Trace names can be right justified

  You can now arange for trace names in the time view display to be right aligned. You can change this and the width of the trace names area by setting X resources:

  	*tview.tracenames.width:	100
  	*tview.tracenames.align:	right
  

• Improved support for Solaris

  Since our aquisition of a Solaris machine I have made some improvements to compilation under Solaris. However the simplest solution for local users seems to be to run the SunOS binaries in compatibility mode. I would suggest putting something like this in your .profile:

  	BINFMT=`$LARDHOME/config/binfmt`
  	case $BINFMT in
  	Solarissparc)	BINFMT=SunOSsparc ;;
  	*)		;;
  	esac
  

• Tcl version 8

  li now uses tcl/tk version 8. This version automagically compiles the tcl code into an internal bytecode, which significantly increases speed.

• select function

  The channels library now has a select function with similar semantics to the unix system call of the same name. The idea is to replace complex wait_until chan_ready constructs with a single select call. Here is an example of an arbitrating multiplexor:

  	forever(
  	  case (select(c1,c2))
  	  when 1 => c1?(c3!(?c1))
  	  when 2 => c2?(c3!(?c2))
          )
  

• tcl commands can return results

  There are now four functions that pass commands to the tcl interpreter:

  tcl_cmd

  Execute a command.

  tcl_cmd_noerr

  Execute a command, and ignore any error that occurs.

  tcl_cmd_int

  Execute a command, and return the integer result.

  tcl_cmd_str

  Execute a command, and return the string result.

• Time view scale menu can be changed

  The scale factors in the time view window can now be changed by setting the variable tview_scalefactors. You can set this from the command line or in your .lirc file. An example is

  	set tview_scalefactors {100 10 1 0.1 0.01}
  

• 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.