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changes in sbcl-0.7.6 relative to sbcl-0.7.5:
  * bug fix: Floating point exceptions are treated much more
    consistently on the x86/Linux and PPC/Linux platforms.
  * Array initialization with :INITIAL-ELEMENT is now much faster for
    cases when the compiler cannot open code the array creation, but
    does know what the UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE will be. General
    array accesses have also seen a speed increase.
  * bug fix: LOAD :IF-DOES-NOT-EXIST NIL now works when file type is
    specified. (This was at the root of some bad interactions between
    SBCL and ILISP: thanks to Gregory Wright for diagnosing this and
    reporting the bug.)
  * bug fix: Internal error arguments for undefined functions are now
    computed correctly on the PPC/Linux platform.
  * bug fix: Bad &REST syntax is now checked correctly. (thanks to
    Raymond Toy's patch for CMU CL)
  * Support for the Solaris 9 operating environment has been included
    (thanks to Daniel Merritt)
  * A very ugly but hopefully complete draft of the missing FFI chapter
    of the manual has been created by reformatting the corresponding
    CMU CL manual chapter into (currently very ugly and incoherent)
    DocBook and bringing it up to date for SBCL behavior. Thus, the
    manual is now essentially complete, at least by my extreme
    once-and-only-once standards, whereby it's acceptable to refer to
    the doc strings of SB-EXT functions as the primary documentation.
  * The fasl file version number has changed again, due to cleanup of
    (user-invisible) bitrotted stuff. (E.g. *!INITIAL-FDEFN-OBJECTS*
    is no longer a static symbol.)

changes in sbcl-0.7.5 relative to sbcl-0.7.4:
  * SBCL now builds with OpenMCL (version 0.12) as the
    cross-compilation host; also, more progress has been made toward
    bootstrapping under CLISP.
  * SBCL now runs on the Tru64 (aka OSF/1) operating system on the
    Alpha architecture.
  * bug 158 fixed: The compiler can now deal with integer loop
    increments different from 1; fixing this turned out also to fix
    bug 164.
  * bug 169 fixed: no more bogus warnings about using lexical bindings
    despite the presence of perfectly good SPECIAL declarations (thanks
    to David Lichteblau)
  * bug 175 fixed: CHANGE-CLASS is now more ANSI-conforming,
    accepting initargs. (thanks to Espen Johnsen and Pierre Mai)
  * bug 179 fixed: DIRECTORY can now deal with filenames with pattern
    characters in them.
  * bug 180 fixed: Method combination specifications no longer ignore
    the :MOST-SPECIFIC-LAST option. (thanks to Pierre Mai)
  * bug fix: Structure type predicate functions now check their argument
    count as they should.
  * bug fix: Classes with :METACLASS STRUCTURE-CLASS now print
    correctly. (thanks to Pierre Mai)
  * minor incompatible change: The --noprogrammer option is deprecated
    in favor of the new --disable-debugger option, which is very similar.
    (The major difference is that it takes effect at a slightly different
    time at startup, causing handling of errors in --sysinit and
    --userinit files will be affected differently.) The
    SB-EXT:DISABLE-DEBUGGER and SB-EXT:ENABLE-DEBUGGER functions have
    been added to allow this functionality to be controlled from ordinary
    Lisp code. (ENABLE-DEBUGGER should help people like the Debian
    maintainers, who might want to run non-interactive scripts to
    build SBCL cores which will later be used interactively.)
  * minor incompatible change: The LOAD function no longer, when given
    a wild pathname to load, loads all files matching that pathname.
    Instead, an error of type FILE-ERROR is signalled.

changes in sbcl-0.7.2 relative to sbcl-0.7.1:
  * incompatible change: The compiler is now less aggressive about
    tail call optimization, doing it only when (> SPACE DEBUG) or
    (> SPEED DEBUG). (This is an incompatible change because there are
    programs which relied on the old CMU-CL-style behavior to optimize
    away their unbounded recursion which will now die of stack overflow.)
  * minor incompatible change: The default BYTES-CONSED-BETWEEN-GCS
    for non-GENCGC systems has been increased to 20M (since that
    seems much closer to the likely performance optimum for modern
    systems than the old 4M value was)
  * minor incompatible change: new larger values for *DEBUG-PRINT-LENGTH*
    and *DEBUG-PRINT-LEVEL*
  * SBCL runs on SPARC systems now. (thanks to Christophe Rhodes' port
    of CMU CL's support for SPARC, and various endianness and other
    SBCL portability fixes due to Christophe Rhodes and Dan Barlow)
  * new syntactic sugar for the Unix command line: --load foo.bar is now
    an alternate notation for --eval '(load "foo.bar")'.
  * bug fixes:
    ** The system now detects stack overflow and handles it gracefully,
       at least for (OR (> SAFETY (MAX SPEED SPACE)) (= SAFETY 3))
       optimization settings. (This is a good thing in general, and
       its introduction in this version should be particularly timely
       for anyone whose code fails because of suppression of tail
       recursion!)
    ** The system now hunts for the C variable "environ" in a more
       devious way, to avoid segfaults when the C library version differs
       between compile time and run time. (thanks to Christophe Rhodes)
    ** INTEGER-valued CATCH tags now work. (thanks to Alexey Dejneka,
       and also to Christophe Rhodes for porting the fix to non-X86 CPUs)
    ** The compiler no longer issues bogus style warnings for undefined
       classes in the same source file as the DEFCLASSes which defined
       them. (thanks to Stig E Sandoe for reporting and Martin Atzmueller
       for fixing this)
    ** fixes in CONDITION class precedence list for undefined function
       errors (thanks to Alexei Dejneka)
    ** *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS* is used more consistently and
       correctly. (thanks to Dan Barlow)
    ** portability fixes aiming at bootstrapping under CLISP (thanks
       to Dave McDonald and Christophe Rhodes)
    ** FORMAT fixes (thanks to Robert Strandh and Dan Barlow)
    ** fixes in type translation and and type inference (thanks to
       Christophe Rhodes)
    ** fixes to optimizer internal errors (thanks to Alexei Dejneka)
    ** various fixes in the new ports (thanks to Dan Barlow)
  * several changes related to debugging:
    ** suppression of tail recursion, as noted above
    ** stack overflow detection, as noted above
    ** The default implementation of TRACE has changed. :ENCAPSULATE T
       is now the default. (For some time encapsulation has been more
       reliable than the breakpoint-based :ENCAPSULATE NIL
       implementation, at least on X86 systems; and I just noticed that
       encapsulation also seems closer to the spirit of the ANSI
       specification.)

changes in sbcl-0.7.1 relative to sbcl-0.7.0:
* mostly bug fixes:
  ** SB-ALIEN:LOAD-FOREIGN and SB-ALIEN:LOAD-1-FOREIGN are set
     up properly again. (There was a packaging bug in 0.7.0 which
     left their definitions in SB-SYS::LOAD-FOREIGN and
     SB-SYS::LOAD-1-FOREIGN. LOAD-FOREIGN and LOAD-1-FOREIGN are
     vital for most things which interface to C-level interfaces,
     like extensions working with sockets or databases or
     Perl-compatible regexes or whatever, and the need to fix
     this bug is the main reason that 0.7.1 was released so
     soon after 0.7.0.)
  ** DEFGENERIC is now choosier about the methods it redefines, so that
     reLOADing a previously-LOADed file containing DEFGENERICs does
     the right thing now. Thus, the Lispy edit/reLOAD-a-little/test
     cycle now works as it should. (thanks to Alexey Dejneka)
  ** Bug 106 (types (COMPLEX FOO) where FOO is an obscure type) was
     fixed by Christophe Rhodes. (He actually submitted this patch
     months ago, and I delayed until after 0.7.0.)
  ** Bug 111 (internal compiler confusion about runtime checks on
     FUNCTION types) was fixed by Alexey Dejneka.
* Some internal cleanups (getting rid of variables which aren't
  needed now that the byte interpreter is gone) caused the fasl
  file format number to change again.

changes in sbcl-0.7.0 relative to sbcl-0.6.13:
* major incompatible change: The default fasl file extension, i.e. the
  default extension for files produced by COMPILE-FILE, has changed
  to ".fasl", for all architectures. (No longer ".x86f" and ".axpf".)
* compiler changes:
  ** There are many changes in the implementation of the compiler.
     SBCL is now essentially a compiler-only implementation of ANSI
     Common Lisp. EVAL still "interprets" a few special cases, but
     almost all the interesting cases are handled by creating
     a LAMBDA expression, calling COMPILE on it, then calling
     FUNCALL on the result.
  ** The EVAL-WHEN code has been rewritten to be ANSI-compliant, and
     various related bugs (IR1-1, IR1-2, IR1-3, IR1-3a) have gone away.
     Since the code is newer, there might still be some new bugs
     (though not as many as before Martin Atzmueller's fixes:-). But
     the new code is substantially simpler and clearer, and hopefully
     any remaining bugs will be simpler, less fundamental, and more
     fixable then the bugs in the old code.
  ** The revised compiler is still a little unsteady on its feet.
     In particular,
     *** The debugging information it produces (particularly the names
         of FUNCTION objects) is sometimes much less useful than what
         the old compiler produced.
     *** The support for inlining FOO when you (DECLAIM (INLINE FOO))
         then do (DEFUN FOO ..) in a non-null lexical environment (e.g.
         within a MACROLET) has been temporarily weakened.
  ** There are new compiler optimizations for various functions:
     *** the sequence functions FIND, POSITION, FIND-IF, POSITION-IF,
         FIND-IF-NOT, POSITION-IF-NOT, and FILL
     *** the math functions TRUNCATE, FLOOR, and CEILING
     *** the function-of-all-trades COERCE
     Mostly these should be transparent, but there's one
     potentially-annoying problem (bug 117): when the compiler
     inline-expands a function and does type analysis on the result,
     it can create control paths which have type mismatches, and
     when it can't prove that those control paths aren't taken,
     it will issue WARNINGs about the type mismatches. This is
     a particular problem in practice for the new sequence functions.
     It's not clear how this should be fixed, and for now, a
     workaround is given in the entry for 117 in the BUGS file.
  ** (Because of the interaction between the two previous items --
     occasional inlining problems and new inline expansions -- some
     of the new sequence function optimizations won't really kick in
     completely until debugging information, and then inlining, are
     straightened out in some future version.)
* minor incompatible changes:
  ** As part of a bug fix by Christophe Rhodes to DIRECTORY behavior,
     DIRECTORY no longer implicitly promotes NIL slots of its
     pathname argument to :WILD. In particular, when you ask for the
     contents of a directory (which you used to be able to do without
     explicit wildcards, e.g. (DIRECTORY "/tmp/")) you now need to use
     explicit wildcards, e.g. (DIRECTORY "/tmp/*.*").
  ** changes in behavior that ANSI explicitly defines to be
     implementation dependent:
     *** The new compiler-only implementation still conforms with ANSI,
         but acts a little different than before. Besides the obvious
	 changes in performance tradeoffs (that the cost per form passed
	 to EVAL has gone up, and the cost per form executed by EVAL
	 has gone down), the behavior of the system changes a little
	 because there are no longer any interpreted function objects.
         COMPILED-FUNCTION-P is now synonymous with FUNCTIONP, and
         e.g. doing COMPILE on the output of interactive DEFUN is
         now a no-op.
     *** The value of INTERNAL-TIME-UNITS-PER-SECOND has been increased
         from 100 to 1000.
     *** The default for the USE list in MAKE-PACKAGE and DEFPACKAGE
         has changed from (:CL) to NIL.
     *** The CHAR-NAME of unprintable ASCII characters which, unlike
         e.g. #\Newline and #\Tab, don't have names specified in the
         ANSI Common Lisp standard, is now based on their ASCII symbolic
         names (#\Nul, #\Soh, #\Stx, etc.) The old CMU-CL-style names
         (#\Null, #\^a, #\^b, etc.) are still accepted by NAME-CHAR, but
         are no longer used for output.
  ** changes in internal implementation constants:
     *** The default value of *BYTES-CONSED-BETWEEN-GCS* has doubled, to
         4 million. (If your application spends a lot of time GCing and
         you have a lot of RAM, you might want to experiment with
         increasing it even more.)
  ** The SB-C-CALL package has been merged into the SB-ALIEN package.
     However, almost all old code should still continue to work without
     immediate update, as SB-C-CALL is now a (deprecated) nickname
     for SB-ALIEN.
  ** Old operator names in the style DEF-FOO are now deprecated in
     favor of new corresponding names DEFINE-FOO, for consistency with
     the naming convention used in the ANSI standard (DEFSTRUCT, DEFVAR,
     DEFINE-CONDITION, DEFINE-MODIFY-MACRO..). This mostly affects
     internal symbols, but a few supported extensions like
     SB-ALIEN:DEF-ALIEN-FUNCTION are also affected. (So e.g.
     DEF-ALIEN-FUNCTION becomes DEFINE-ALIEN-FUNCTION.)
  ** The debugger prompt sequence now goes "5]", "5[2]", "5[3]",
     etc. as you get deeper into recursive calls to the debugger
     command loop, instead of the old "5]", "5]]", "5]]]"
     sequence. (I was motivated to do this when squabbles between
     ILISP and SBCL left me very deeply nested in the debugger. In the
     short term, this change will probably provoke more ILISP/SBCL
     squabbles, but hopefully it will be an improvement in the long run.)
  ** SB-ALIEN:DEFINE-ALIEN-FUNCTION (also known by the old deprecated
     name DEF-ALIEN-FUNCTION) now does DECLAIM FTYPE for the defined
     function, since declaiming return types involving aliens is
     (1) annoyingly messy to do by hand and (2) vital to efficient
     compilation of code which calls such functions.
  ** SB-ALIEN:LOAD-FOREIGN and SB-ALIEN:LOAD-1-FOREIGN are no
     longer reexported by the SB-EXT package. They're solely useful
     for alien code, so it seems more logical that you should get
     them from the SB-ALIEN package, not in SB-EXT.
  ** :SB-CONSTRAIN-FLOAT-TYPE, :SB-PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE, and
     :SB-PROPAGATE-FUN-TYPE are no longer considered to be optional
     features. Instead, the code that they used to control is always
     built into the system.
* many other bug fixes
  ** DEFSTRUCT and DEFCLASS have been substantially updated to take
     advantage of the new EVAL-WHEN stuff and to clean them up in
     general, and they are now more ANSI-compliant in a number of
     ways. Martin Atzmueller is responsible for a lot of this.
  ** Besides the cleanups discussed above, Martin Atzmueller fixed
     several other bugs:
     *** fixes in READ-SEQUENCE and WRITE-SEQUENCE
     *** correct ERROR type for various file operations
     *** some fixes for Lisp streams
     *** DEFMETHOD syntax checking
     *** changing old weird representation of debug information as
         strings (which, among their other deficiencies, don't transform
         correctly when you rename packages, and don't change their
         print representation when you change things like *PACKAGE*
	 and *PRINT-LENGTH*) to symbols and lists of symbols
     He also made several improvements and fixed several bugs in DESCRIBE.
  ** Alexey Dejneka fixed many bugs, including classic bugs and bugs he
     discovered himself:
     *** misbehavior of WRITE-STRING/WRITE-LINE
     *** LOOP over keys of a hash table, LOOP bugs 49b and 81 and 103,
         and several other LOOP problems as well
     *** DIRECTORY when similar filenames are present
     *** DEFGENERIC with :METHOD options
     *** bug 126, in (MAKE-STRING N :INITIAL-ELEMENT #\SPACE))
     *** bug in the optimization of ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE
     *** argument ordering in FIND with :TEST option
     *** mishandled package designator argument in APROPOS-LIST
     *** various problems in the backquote readmacro
     *** a bug in APROPOS
     *** probably some others that I'm not describing very well here,
         since the CVS log documents them by reference to sbcl-devel
         messages, and the SourceForge archives aren't working well.:-(
  ** Dan Barlow improved the Alpha port (and is making progress on the
     PPC port, for those of you who think different).
  ** Besides the DIRECTORY fixes and changes mentioned elsewhere,
     Christophe Rhodes cleaned up the system self-test scripts (in tests/*),
     contributed the optimization of FIND-IF-NOT and POSITION-IF-NOT, and
     continues to work on the SPARC port (for those of you in a position
     to look down upon our little PC-compatible boxes from a great height).
  ** PPRINT-LOGICAL-BLOCK now copies the *PRINT-LINES* value on entry
     and uses that copy, rather than the current dynamic value, when
     it's trying to decide whether to truncate output. Thus e.g.
       (let ((*print-lines* 50))
         (pprint-logical-block (stream nil)
           (dotimes (i 10)
             (let ((*print-lines* 8))
               (print (aref possiblybigthings i) stream)))))
     should now truncate the logical block only at 50 lines, instead of
     often truncating it at 8 lines, as it did before.
* The doc/cmucl/ directory, containing old CMU CL documentation
  from the time of the fork, is no longer part of the base system.
  SourceForge has shut down its anonymous FTP service, and with it
  my original plan for distributing the old CMU CL documentation
  there. For now, if you need these files you can download an old
  SBCL source release and extract them from it.
* The fasl file version number changed again, for dozens of reasons,
  some of which are apparent above.

changes in sbcl-0.6.13 relative to sbcl-0.6.12:
* a port to the Compaq/DEC Alpha CPU, thanks to Dan Barlow
* Martin Atzmueller ported Tim Moore's marvellous CMU CL DISASSEMBLE
  patch, so that DISASSEMBLE output is much nicer.
* The code in the SB-PROFILE package now seems reasonably stable.
  I still haven't decided what the final interface should look like
  (I'd like PROFILE to interact cleanly with TRACE, since both
  facilities use function encapsulation) but if you have a need
  for profiling now, you can probably use it successfully with
  the current CMU-CL-style interface.
* Pathnames and *DEFAULT-DIRECTORY-DEFAULTS* are much more
  ANSI-compliant, thanks to various fixes and tests from Dan Barlow.
  Also, at Dan Barlow's suggestion, TRUENAME on a dangling symbolic
  link now returns the dangling link itself, and for similar
  reasons, TRUENAME on a cyclic symbolic link returns the cyclic
  link itself. (In these cases the old code signalled an error and
  looped endlessly, respectively.) Thus, DIRECTORY now works even
  in the presence of dangling and cyclic symbolic links.
* Compiler trace output (the :TRACE-FILE option to COMPILE-FILE)
  is now a supported extension again, since the consensus on
  sbcl-devel was that it can be useful for ordinary development
  work, not just for debugging SBCL itself.
* The default for SB-EXT:*DERIVE-FUNCTION-TYPES* has changed to
  NIL, i.e. ANSI behavior, i.e. the compiler now recognizes
  that currently-defined functions might be redefined later with
  different return types.
* Hash tables can be printed readably, as inspired by CMU CL code
  of Eric Marsden and SBCL code of Martin Atzmueller.
* better error handling in CLOS method combination, thanks to
  Martin Atzmueller porting Pierre Mai's CMU CL patches
* more overflow fixes for >16Mbyte I/O buffers
* A bug in READ has been fixed, so that now a single Ctrl-D
  character suffices to cause end-of-file on character streams.
  In particular, now you only need one Ctrl-D at the command
  line (not two) to exit SBCL.
* fixed bug 26: ARRAY-DISPLACEMENT now returns (VALUES NIL 0) for
  undisplaced arrays.
* fixed bug 107 (reported as a CMU CL bug by Erik Naggum on
  comp.lang.lisp 2001-06-11): (WRITE #*101 :RADIX T :BASE 36) now
  does the right thing.
* The implementation of some type tests, especially for CONDITION
  types, is now tidier and maybe faster, due to CMU CL code
  originally by Douglas Crosher, ported by Martin Atzmueller.
* Some math functions have been fixed, and there are new
  optimizers for deriving the types of COERCE and ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE,
  thanks to Raymond Toy's work on CMU CL, ported by Martin Atzmueller.
* (There are also some new optimizers in contrib/*-extras.lisp. Those
  aren't built into sbcl-0.6.13, but are a sneak preview of what's
  likely to be built into sbcl-0.7.0.)
* A bug in COPY-READTABLE was fixed. (Joao Cachopo's patch to CMU
  CL, ported to SBCL by Martin Atzmueller)
* DESCRIBE now gives more information in some cases. (Pierre Mai's
  patch to CMU CL, ported to SBCL by Martin Atzmueller)
* Martin Atzmueller and Bill Newman fixed some bugs in INSPECT.
* There's a new slam.sh hack to shorten the edit/compile/debug
  cycle for low-level changes to SBCL itself, and a new
  :SB-AFTER-XC-CORE target feature to control the generation of
  the after-xc.core file needed by slam.sh.
* minor incompatible change: The ENTRY-POINTS &KEY argument to
  COMPILE-FILE is no longer supported, so that now every function
  gets an entry point, so that block compilation looks a little
  more like the plain vanilla ANSI section 3.2.2.3 scheme.
* minor incompatible change: SB-EXT:GET-BYTES-CONSED now
  returns the number of bytes consed since the system started,
  rather than the number consed since the first time the function
  was called. (The new definition parallels ANSI functions like
  CL:GET-INTERNAL-RUN-TIME.)
* minor incompatible change: The old CMU-CL-style DIRECTORY options,
  i.e. :ALL, :FOLLOW-LINKS, and :CHECK-FOR-SUBDIRS, are no longer
  supported. Now DIRECTORY always does the abstract Common-Lisp-y
  thing, i.e. :ALL T :FOLLOW-LINKS T :CHECK-FOR-SUBDIRS T.
* Fasl file version numbers are now independent of the target CPU,
  since historically most system changes which required version
  number changes have affected all CPUs equally. Similarly,
  the byte fasl file version is now equal to the ordinary
  fasl file version.

changes in sbcl-0.6.12 relative to sbcl-0.6.11:
* incompatible change: The old SB-EXT:OPTIMIZE-INTERFACE declaration
  is no longer recognized. I apologize for this, because it was
  listed in SB-EXT as a supported extension, but I found that
  its existing behavior was poorly specified, as well as incorrectly
  specified, and it looked like too much of a mess to straighten it
  out. I have enough on my hands trying to get ANSI stuff to work..
* many patches ported from CMU CL by Martin Atzmueller, with
  half a dozen bug fixes in pretty-printing and the debugger, and
  half a dozen others elsewhere
* fixed bug 13: Floating point infinities are now supported again.
  They might still be a little bit flaky, but thanks to bug reports
  from Nathan Froyd and CMU CL patches from Raymond Toy they're not
  as flaky as they were.
* The --noprogrammer command line option is now supported. (Its
  behavior is slightly different in detail from what the old man
  page claimed it would do, but it's still appropriate under the
  same circumstances that the man page talks about.)
* The :SB-PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE and :SB-PROPAGATE-FUN-TYPE features
  are now supported, and enabled by default. Thus, the compiler can
  handle many floating point and complex operations much less
  inefficiently. (Thus e.g. you can implement a complex FFT
  without consing!)
* The compiler now detects type mismatches between DECLAIM FTYPE
  and DEFUN better, and implements CHECK-TYPE more correctly, and
  SBCL builds under CMU CL again despite its non-ANSI EVAL-WHEN,
  thanks to patches from Martin Atzmueller.
* various fixes to make the cross-compiler more portable to
  ANSI-conforming-but-different cross-compilation hosts (notably
  Lispworks for Windows, following bug reports from Arthur Lemmens)
* A bug in READ-SEQUENCE for CONCATENATED-STREAM, and a gross
  ANSI noncompliance in DEFMACRO &KEY argument parsing, have been
  fixed thanks to Pierre Mai's CMU CL patches.
* fixes to keep the system from overflowing internal counters when
  it tries to use i/o buffers larger than 16M bytes
* fixed bug 45a: Various internal functions required to support
  complex special functions have been merged from CMU CL sources.
  (When I was first setting up SBCL, I misunderstood a compile-time
  conditional #-OLD-SPECFUN, and so accidentally deleted them.)
* improved support for type intersection and union, fixing bug 12
  (e.g., now (SUBTYPEP 'KEYWORD 'SYMBOL)=>T,T) and some other
  more obscure bugs as well
* some steps toward byte-compiling non-performance-critical
  parts of the system, courtesy of patches from Martin Atzmueller
* Christophe Rhodes has made some debian packages of sbcl at
  <http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/debian/lisp>.
  From his sbcl-devel e-mail of 2001-04-08 they're not completely
  stable, but are nonetheless usable. When he's ready, I'd be happy
  to add them to the SourceForge "File Releases" section. (And if
  anyone wants to do RPMs or *BSD packages, they'd be welcome too.)
* new fasl file format version number (because of changes in
  internal representation of (OR ..) types to accommodate the new
  support for (AND ..) types, among other things)

changes in sbcl-0.6.11 relative to sbcl-0.6.10:
* Martin Atzmueller pointed out that bugs #9 and #25 are gone in
  current SBCL.
* bug 34 fixed by Martin Atzmueller: dumping/loading instances works
  better
* fixed bug 40: TYPEP, SUBTYPEP, UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE,
  and UPGRADED-COMPLEX-PART-TYPE now work better with of compound
  types built from undefined types, e.g. '(VECTOR SOME-UNDEF-TYPE).
* DESCRIBE now works on structure objects again.
* Most function call argument type mismatches are now handled as
  STYLE-WARNINGs instead of full WARNINGs, since the compiler doesn't
  know whether the function will be redefined before the call is
  executed. (The compiler could flag local calls with full WARNINGs,
  as per the ANSI spec "3.2.2.3 Semantic Constraints", but right now
  it doesn't keep track of enough information to know whether calls
  are local in this sense.)
* Compiler output is now more verbose, with messages truncated
  later than before. (There should be some supported way for users
  to override the default verbosity, but I haven't decided how to
  provide it yet, so this behavior is still controlled by the internal
  SB-C::*COMPILER-ERROR-PRINT-FOO* variables in
  src/compiler/ir1util.lisp.)
* Fasl file format version numbers have increased again, because
  support for the Gray streams extension changes the layout of the
  system's STREAM objects.
* The Gray subclassable streams extension now works, thanks to a
  patch from Martin Atzmueller.
* The full LOAD-FOREIGN extension (not just the primitive
  LOAD-FOREIGN-1) now works, thanks to a patch from Martin Atzmueller.
* The default behavior of RUN-PROGRAM has changed. Now, unlike CMU CL
  but like most other programs, it defaults to copying the Unix
  environment from the original process instead of starting the
  new process in an empty environment.
* Extensions which manipulate the Unix environment now support
  an :ENVIRONMENT keyword option which doesn't smash case or
  do other bad things. The CMU-CL-style :ENV option is retained
  for porting convenience.
* LOAD-FOREIGN (and LOAD-1-FOREIGN) now support logical pathnames,
  as per Daniel Barlow's suggestion and Martin Atzmueller's patch

changes in sbcl-0.6.10 relative to sbcl-0.6.9:

* A patch from Martin Atzmueller seems to have solved the SIGINT
  problem, and as far as we know, signal-handling now works cleanly.
  (If you find any new bugs, please report them!)
* The system no longer defaults Lisp source file names to types
  ".l", ".cl", or ".lsp", but only to ".lisp".
* The compiler no longer uses special default file extensions for
  byte-compiled code. (The ANSI definition of COMPILE-FILE-PATHNAME
  seems to expect a single default extension for all compiled code,
  and there's no compelling reason to try to stretch the standard
  to allow two different extensions.) Instead, byte-compiled files
  default to the same extension as native-compiled files.
* Fasl file format version numbers have increased again, because
  a rearrangement of internal implementation packages made some
  dumped symbols in old fasl files unreadable in new cores.
* DECLARE/DECLAIM/PROCLAIM logic is more nearly ANSI in general, with
  many fewer weird special cases.
* Bug #17 (differing COMPILE-FILE behavior between logical and
  physical pathnames) has been fixed, and some related misbehavior too,
  thanks to a patch from Martin Atzmueller.
* Bug #30 (reader problems) is gone, thanks to a CMU CL patch
  by Tim Moore, ported to SBCL by Martin Atzmueller.
* Martin Atzmueller fixed several filesystem-related problems,
  including bug #36, in part by porting CMU CL patches, which were
  written in part by Paul Werkowski.
* More compiler warnings in src/runtime/ are gone, thanks to
  more patches from Martin Atzmueller.
* Martin Atzmueller pointed out that bug 37 was fixed by his patches
  some time ago.

changes in sbcl-0.6.9 relative to sbcl-0.6.8:

* DESCRIBE now works on CONDITION objects.
* The debugger now handles errors which arise when trying to print
  *DEBUG-CONDITION*, so that it's less likely to fall into infinite
  regress.
* The build system now uses an additional file, customize-target-features.lisp,
  to allow local modifications to the target *FEATURES* list. (The point of
  this is that now I can set up a custom configuration, e.g. with :SB-SHOW
  debugging features enabled, without having to worry about propagating it
  into everyone's system when I do a "cvs update".) When no
  customize-target-features.lisp file exists, the target *FEATURES* list
  should be constructed the same way as before.
* fixed bugs in DEFCONSTANT ANSI-compatibility:
  ** DEFCONSTANT now tests reassignments using EQL, not EQUAL, in order to
     warn about behavior which is undefined under the ANSI spec. Note: This
     is specified by ANSI, but it's not very popular with programmers.
     If it causes you problems, take a look at the new SB-INT:DEFCONSTANT-EQX
     macro in the SBCL sources for an example of a workaround which you
     might use to make portable ANSI-standard code which does what you want.
  ** DEFCONSTANT's implementation is now based on EVAL-WHEN instead of on
     pre-ANSI IR1 translation magic, so it does the ANSI-specified thing
     when it's used as a non-toplevel form. (This is required in order
     to implement the DEFCONSTANT-EQX macro.)
  ** (DEFCONSTANT X 1) (DEFVAR X) (SETF X 2) no longer "works".
  ** Unfortunately, non-toplevel DEFCONSTANT forms can still do some
     funny things, due to bugs in the implementation of EVAL-WHEN
     (bug #IR1-3). This probably won't be fixed until 0.7.x. (Fortunately,
     non-toplevel DEFCONSTANTs are uncommon.)
* The core file version number and fasl file version number have been
  incremented, because the old noncompliant DEFCONSTANT behavior involved
  calling functions which no longer exist, and because I also took the
  opportunity to chop an unsupported slot out of the DEBUG-SOURCE structure.
* fixed bug 1 (error handling before read-eval-print loop starts), and
  redid debugger restarts and related debugger commands somewhat while
  doing so:
  ** The QUIT debugger command is gone, since it did something
     rather different than the SB-EXT:QUIT command, and since it never
     worked properly outside the main toplevel read/eval/print loop.
     Invoking the new TOPLEVEL restart provides the same functionality.
  ** The GO debugger command is also gone, since you can just invoke
     the CONTINUE restart directly instead.
  ** The TOP debugger command is also gone, since it's redundant with the
     FRAME 0 command, and since it interfered with abbreviations for the
     TOPLEVEL restart.
* The system now recovers better from non-PACKAGE values of the *PACKAGE*
  variable.
* The system now understands compound CONS types (e.g. (CONS FIXNUM T))
  as required by ANSI. (thanks to Douglas Crosher's CMU CL patches, with
  some porting work by Martin Atzmueller)
* Martin Atzmueller reviewed the CMU CL mailing lists and came back
  with a boatload of patches which he ported to SBCL. Now that those
  have been applied,
  ** The system tries to make sure that its low-priority messages
     are prefixed by semicolons, to help people who like to use
     syntax highlighting in their ILISP buffer. (This patch
     was originally due to Raymond Toy.)
  ** The system now optimizes INTEGER-LENGTH better, thanks to more
     patches originally written by Raymond Toy.
  ** The compiler understands coercion between single-value and
     multiple-VALUES type expressions better, getting rid of some very
     weird behavior, thanks to patches originally by Robert MacLachlan
     and Douglas Crosher.
  ** The system understands ANSI-style non-KEYWORD &KEY arguments in
     lambda lists, thanks to a patch originally by Pierre Mai.
  ** The system no longer bogusly warns about "abbreviated type
     declarations".
  ** The compiler gets less confused by inlining and RETURN-FROM,
     thanks to some patches originally by Tim Moore.
  ** The system no longer hangs when dumping circular lists to fasl
     files, thanks to a patch originally from Douglas Crosher.
* Martin Atzmueller also fixed ROOM, so that it no longer fails with an
  undefined function error.
* gave up on fixing bug 3 (forbidden-by-ANSI warning for type mismatch
  in structure slot initforms) for now, documented workaround instead:-|
* fixed bug 4 (no WARNING for DECLAIM FTYPE of slot accessor function)
* fixed bug 5: added stubs for various Gray stream functions called
  in the not-a-CL:STREAM case, so that even when Gray streams aren't
  installed, at least appropriate type errors are generated
* fixed bug 8: better reporting of various PROGRAM-ERRORs
* fixed bug 9: IGNORE and IGNORABLE now work reasonably and more
  consistently in DEFMETHOD forms.
* removed bug 21 from BUGS, since Martin Atzmueller points out that
  it doesn't seem to affect SBCL after all
* The C runtime system now builds with better optimization and many
  fewer warnings, thanks to lots of cleanups by Martin Atzmueller.

changes in sbcl-0.6.8 relative to sbcl-0.6.7:

* The system is now under CVS at SourceForge (instead of the
  CVS repository on my home machine).
* The new signal handling code has been tweaked to treat register
  contents as (UNSIGNED-BYTE 32), as the old CMU CL code did,
  instead of (SIGNED-BYTE 32), as the C header files have it. (Code
  downstream, e.g. in debug-int.lisp, has implicit dependencies
  on the unsignedness of integer representation of machine words,
  and that caused the system to bomb out with infinite regress
  when trying to recover from type errors involving signed values,
  e.g. (BUTLAST '(1 2 3) -1).)
* (BUTLAST NIL) and (NBUTLAST NIL) now return NIL as they should.
  (This was one of the bugs Peter Van Eynde reported back in July.)
* The system now uses code inspired by Colin Walters' O(N)
  implementation of MAP (from the cmucl-imp@cons.org mailing
  list, 2 September 2000) when it can't use a DEFTRANSFORM to
  inline the MAP operation, and there is more than one
  sequence argument to the MAP call (so that it can't just
  do ETYPECASE once and for all based on the type of the
  single sequence argument). (The old non-inline implementation
  of the general M-argument sequence-of-length-N case required
  O(M*N*N) time when any of the sequence arguments were LISTs.)
* The QUIT :UNIX-CODE keyword argument has been renamed to
  QUIT :UNIX-STATUS. (The old name still works, but is deprecated.)
* Raymond Wiker's patches to port RUN-PROGRAM from CMU CL to SBCL
  have been added.
* Raymond Wiker's patches to port dynamic loading from Linux to
  FreeBSD have been added.
* The BUGS file is now more nearly up to date, thanks in large part
  to Martin Atzmueller's review of it.
* The debugger now flushes standard output streams before it begins
  its output ("debugger invoked" and so forth).
* The core version number and fasl file version number have both
  been incremented, because of incompatible changes in the layout
  of static symbols.
* FINISH-OUTPUT is now called more consistently on QUIT. (It
  used to not be called for a saved Lisp image.)
* Martin Atzmueller's version of a patch to fix a compiler crash,
  as posted on sbcl-devel 13 September 2000, has been installed.
* Instead of installing Martin Atzmueller's patch for the
  compiler transform for SUBSEQ, I deleted the compiler transform,
  and transforms for some similar consing operations.
* A bug in signal handling which kept TRACE from working on OpenBSD
  has been fixed.
* added enough DEFTRANSFORMs to allow (SXHASH 'FOO) to be optimized
  away by constant folding
* The system now defines its address space constants in one place
  (in the Lisp sources), and propagates them automatically elsewhere
  (through GENESIS and the sbcl.h file). Therefore, patching the
  address map is less unnecessarily tedious and error-prone. The
  Lisp names of address space constants have also been systematized.
* CVS tags like dollar-Header-dollar have been removed from
  the sources, because they have never saved me trouble and
  they've been source of trouble working with patches and other
  diff-related operations.
* fixed the PROG1-vs.-PROGN bug in HANDLER-BIND (reported by
  ole.rohne@cern.ch on cmucl-help@cons.org 2000-10-25)