Changes from 4.2.0 to 4.2.1
---------------------------
1. Support for OS/2 has been brought up to date. This support was
accidentally omitted from the initial 4.2 release, for which
we apologize.
2. The manual received a number of updates to make it format better
for PDF.
3. A new configure option, --enable-versioned-dir, causes the directory
holding extensions to include the API version in its name.
4. extension/configure.ac has been improved considerably.
5. In MPFR mode, When ROUNDMODE changes, string values for numerically
type values will be redone.
6. The various 'inplace' tests now pass on modern BSD systems.
7. A number of bugs, some of them quite significant, have been fixed.
See the ChangeLog for details.
Changes from 4.1.4 to 4.2.0
---------------------------
1. If not in POSIX mode, changes to ENVIRON are reflected into
gawk's environment, affecting any programs run by system()
or for piped redirections. This can also affect built-in routines, such
as mktime(), which is typically influenced by the TZ environment variable.
2. The series of numbers returned by rand() should now be "more
random" than previously. Gawk's rand() remains repeatable; you will
get the same series of numbers each time you call rand() repeatedly,
but this will be a different series than previously.
3. Multiple changes related to the pretty printer:
* The --pretty-print option no longer runs the program too.
* Pretty printing now preserves comments and places them into the
pretty-printed file.
* Pretty-printing now uses the original text of constant numeric values
for pretty-printing and profiling.
* Pretty-printing now preserves parenthesized expressions as they
were in the source file. This solves several niggling corner cases
with such things.
4. The igawk script and igawk.1 man page are no longer installed by
`make install'. They have been obsolete since gawk 4.0.0.
5. Gawk can now be built with CMake. This is an alternative build
system for those who may want it; gawk is not going to switch off
use of the autotools anytime soon, if ever.
6. Gawk now processes a maximum of two hexadecimal digits in \x
escape sequences inside strings.
7. Setting PROCINFO["redirection", "NONFATAL"] to true makes I/O
errors for "redirection" not fatal, setting ERRNO. Setting
PROCINFO["NONFATAL"] makes all I/O nonfatal. See the manual.
8. MirBSD is no longer supported.
9. `make install' now installs shell startup files
$sysconfdir/profile.d/gawk.{csh,sh} containing shell functions to
manipulate the AWKPATH and AWKLIBPATH environment variables. On a Fedora
system, these files belong in /etc/profile.d, but the appropriate location
may be different on other platforms.
10. Gawk now supports retryable I/O via PROCINFO[input-file, "RETRY"]; see
the manual.
11. The C API has undergone changes that break binary compatibility with
the previous version. Thus the API version is now at 2.0. YOU WILL
NEED TO RECOMPILE YOUR EXTENSIONS to work with this version of gawk.
Source code compatibility remains intact, although you will get
compiler warnings if you do not revise your extensions. We strongly
recommend that you do so. Fortunately, the changes are fairly minor
and straightforward.
See the manual for the new features.
12. Revisions in the POSIX standard remove the special case for POSIX
mode when FS = " " where newline was not a field separator. The code
and doc have been updated.
13. Gawk now supports strongly typed regexp constants. Such constants
look like @/.../. You can assign them to variables, pass them to
functions, use them in ~, !~ and the case part of a switch statement.
More details are provided in the manual.
14. The new typeof() function can be used to indicate if a variable or
array element is an array, regexp, string or number.
15. As promised when 4.1 was released, the old extension mechanism,
using the `extension' function, is now gone.
16. Support for GNU/Linux on Alpha systems has been removed.
17. Optimizations are now enabled by default. Use the new -s/--no-optimize
option(s) to disable them. Pretty-printing and profiling automatically
disable optimizations so that the output program is the same as the
original input program.
18. Gawk now uses fwrite_unlocked if it's available. This yields a 7% - 18%
improvement in raw output speed (gawk '{ print }' on a large file).
19. Passing negative operands to any of the bitwise functions now
produces a fatal error.
20. Programs that toggle IGNORECASE a lot should now be noticeably faster.
21. The mktime function now accepts an optional second argument. If this
argument is present and is non-zero or non-null, the time will be converted
from UTC instead of from the local timezone.
22. The FIELDWIDTHS parsing syntax has been enhanced to allow specifying
how many characters to skip before a field starts. It also allows
specifying '*' as the last character to mean "the rest of the record".
Field splitting with FIELDWIDTHS now sets NF correctly. The documentation
for FIELDWIDTHS in the manual has been considerably reorganized and
improved as well.
23. The PROCINFO["argv"] array records all of gawk's command line arguments
as gawk received them (the values of the C level argv array).
24. The DJGPP port has been revived and now has an official maintainer.
25. The manual has been translated into Italian! The translation is
included in the distribution.
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