[Ecls-list] Status of pre-release

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

- There has been a lack of synchronization between the git and CVS
repositories which I can not yet explain. This has been solved a few
hours ago, hopefully.

- I have committed about 40 patches that change error messages,
introducing more detailed descriptions of which functions originate
the errors (formerly this information might be missing if the function
was called with low debug settings), informing the number or name of
the argument that causes the error and resorting to common lisp
conditions instead of a generic error message.

- Almost all error messages are being turned from correctable to
uncorrectable, in a move that is consistent with other
implementations. If a program passes a wrong value to SQRT, then there
is obviously a serious problem that can not be just corrected by
passing a substitute value. Correctable errors should be left for
really correctable conditions, such as missing files, etc -- I do not
mean that these correctable cases have been implemented, though.

- A new macro has been introduced, called "unlikely_if()" which is
used to implement assertions that are unlikely to fail. This uses
GCC's __builtin_expect() to generate more efficient code. In general
the resulting code is also smaller and similar to SBCL's, which places
all error condition code at the end of the function -- hopefully also
improving caching of code!

- I am now conducting extensive tests myself with all usual software,
(OpenAxion, Maxima, swank, etc). Along the week I will produce the
10.3.1 release.

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com