[Ecls-list] Merry Xmas

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

No, this is not a spam e-mail offering you a nice toy for your children, but 
it is me wishing you all a nice Xmas and a happy new year. And also 
mentioning the latest improvements on the CVS tree

+ Internally, the parameter specializers of a method are now either NIL, an 
EQL specializer, or a class object. Formerly, class _names_ would be stored, 
which leads to inconsistent result when a class is renamed or FIND-METHOD is 
used.

+ Several bugfixes in LCM, CEILING and ROUND, and also in ASH, that was bitten 
by a C "feature". Namely, that right shifting integer numbers by a large 
amount (> # of bits) leads to unpredictable results. Apparently, it is not a 
bug of GCC on intel (which uses SAR for implementing the shift and gives 
wrong results for (-1) >> 37), but a corner of the ISO C99 spec.

+ CLASS-OF is now part of the core, and has been fixed.

And now the bad news:

+ The compiler has a known and rather inconvenient bug. Namely, tail self call 
elimination produces wrong results if there exists a FLET/LABEL with a 
function that has the same name as the enclosing one. For instance, this 
loops ad-infinitum
	(defun f1 (x)
	  (flet ((f1 (y) 0))
	    (f1 2))

I will fix this over my holidays which incidentally begin tomorrow and end up 
on the 7th of January :-) My level of responsiveness will thus decrease 
significantly, but maybe I come back with some nice surprises as a 
compensation for not making a Xmas release, unlike the linux kernel people.

Regards

Juanjo