[Larceny-users] ANN: Larceny v0.97 "Funny in the Head"

[William D Clinger]

Larceny v0.97 ("Funny in the Head") is now available
for download at http://larceny.ccs.neu.edu/

This release delivers several improvements over v0.96:

    Larceny now defaults to UTF-8 transcoding on Unix
    systems, including Linux and MacOS X.  Latin-1
    can still be specified from the command line.

    Larceny's mapping from ERR5RS/R6RS library names
    to files now recognizes a .larceny.sls suffix and
    a LARCENY_LIBPATH environment variable.

    Larceny supports the SRFI 97 naming convention for
    ERR5RS/R6RS libraries, and implements all but 7
    of the 49 R6RS-compatible SRFIs listed by SRFI 97.

    Implementations of several SRFIs have been improved.

    A new procedure, r5rs:require, allows R5RS libraries
    to be required by ERR5RS or R6RS code.

    compile-stale-libraries is a little faster
    (less slow) and more reliable (less unreliable).

    Faster (less slow) compilation of large libraries
    and programs.  Faster system builds.

    Improved (less poor) profiling.

    Arithmetic conforms to both R5RS and R6RS semantics.

    Fixnum-specific, flonum-specific, mixed-mode, and
    some bignum operations are faster (less slow).

    The bignum range has been expanded to 2^29 bits
    (over 160 million decimal digits).

    string-titlecase has been corrected to break words
    as specified by Unicode Annex 29.

    The guard syntax now calls raise-continuable
    instead of raise when all clauses' tests are
    false.

    R6RS file options are fully implemented (except on
    Windows, where no-truncate still doesn't work).

    A closer approximation to our best guess as to the
    R6RS semantics intended for set-port-position! has
    been implemented for all file and string ports.

    When Larceny is launched from a dumped heap image,
    all eq? and eqv? hashtables rehash themselves
    automatically.

    On exit, all open ports are closed and output buffers
    are flushed.

    Common Larceny now supports ERR5RS and R6RS modes,
    assuming you're patient enough to compile the R6RS
    runtime and the standard R6RS libraries and SRFI
    libraries.

We thank Dave Herman for improving Larceny's web site.

William D Clinger
Felix S Klock II