OpenEuphoria Manual

9.25 Version 2.3 Alpha November 30, 2001

This release updates the Euphoria Interpreter for WIN32, DOS32 and Linux. It also updates the Euphoria To C Translator for all platforms, and it introduces a new product - the Euphoria Interpreter Source Code.

• The registration incentives and prices have changed.
  • The Interpreter product now has just one option: WIN32, DOS32 and Linux, formerly $59, for just $39.
  • The Interpreter source code (minus a few registered features) is now available for $49. See the a href=license.htm>source license</a> and a href=register.htm>register.doc</a> for more details.
  • The Translator continues to cost $29.
  • When Public Domain users reach 300 statements, they will no longer lose the run-time error diagnostics. They will only lose the trace() facility.
• The Euphoria interpreter can now be built successfully by 6 different C compilers on 3 platforms.
• New namespace qualifiers eliminate naming conflicts between identical global symbols declared in different include files. Also, local symbols will now override global symbols of the same name, rather than causing an error.
• The Complete Edition Interpreter product comes with a new 2-pass binder/shrouder that eliminates all unused routines and constants, resulting in smaller executable files. It also has an option to bind clear source, so you can get understandable error messages from your users.
• A new environment variable, EUINC, has been introduced. If present, it specifies a list of additional directories that will be searched for include files. The directory containing the main file is always searched first, then the directories in EUINC, then euphoria\include.
• The Interpreter now supports a new trace mode, trace(3). It logs all executed Euphoria statements to a file, so you'll be able to see the last statement that was executed at the time of any crash, as well as the 499 statements that preceded it. This is particularly helpful in the case of machine-level crashes where Euphoria is unable to write an ex.err file. Thanks to Matthew Lewis.
• The Euphoria interpreter can now pass Euphoria data - atoms and sequences, to .dll files coded in Euphoria and built by the Translator. Use the new E_ types in dll.e
• On Linux we added RTLD_GLOBAL on the dlopen() call. This lets you link successfully with more shared libraries.
• On Linux, when using the #! feature on the first line, to make your source file directly executable, you no longer need a .exu extension on your file. Linux programmers often prefer to have no extension on their executable files.
• Windows callback routines written in Euphoria can now take 9 arguments (was 8). Thanks to Matt Lewis.
• In addition to C_DOUBLE (8-byte floating point), C_FLOAT (4-byte floating-point) is now supported for arguments and return values from C routines. Thanks to David Guy.
• Windows .dlls opened with open_dll() are now closed automatically when your program terminates. This avoids a tiny bit of memory leakage. Thanks to Euman.
• safe.e has a new option to check just the edges of registered blocks and not complain if other blocks of memory are used.
• get_bytes() is 30% faster.
• allocate_string() was speeded up. Thanks to Yuku Sugianto.
• The mydata.ex demo program now uses an EDS database.
• bug fixed - Translator: When a global or local variable containing a sequence or floating-point number was assigned the result of a function, and at some point during the function call the global or local variable was overwritten, some corruption would take place, leading to a probable crash later in the program. Thanks to Sergio Gelli.
• bug fixed - Linux Interpreter: programs of more than a few thousand lines had a chance (maybe 20%) of having one of their statements crash whenever it was executed.
• bug fixed - Interpreter: s[i][j]...[k] = s caused the interpreter to crash. i.e. an assignment of an entire sequence to an element of an element of itself using 2 or more levels of subscripting. Thanks to Henri Goffin.
• bug fixed - Linux binder: (Kenneth Rhodes) Bound executable programs stored somewhere on the search path would not run properly unless they were in the current directory or unless you specified the full path to the executable.
• bug fixed - Binder: "with profile_time" in a bound or shrouded program would cause a crash
• bug fixed - DOS Interpreter: In image.e, put_screen_char() has been corrected to have: if overflow > 0 then ... instead of: if overflow then ...
• bug fixed - Interpreter: A time optimization for slicing could in rare cases cause a lot of wasted space. The optimization has been adjusted to handle those cases. Thanks to Brian Clausing.
• bug fixed - safe.e: free() and free_low() were not actually freeing the block of memory, and on Linux free() could cause a segmentation violation. The same routines in machine.e were ok.
• bug fixed - Translator for DJGPP: A couple of minor differences from ex.exe in the display of text were corrected.
• bug fixed - define_c_var(): works on WIN32 too. The documentation was corrected.