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1New in alpha3.8:  Bug fix for signed/unsigned mixup, found and fixed
2by the FreeBSD folks.
3
4New in alpha3.7:  A bit of cleanup aimed at maximizing portability,
5possibly at slight cost in efficiency.  "ul" suffixes and "unsigned long"
6no longer appear, in particular.
7
8New in alpha3.6:  A couple more portability glitches fixed.
9
10New in alpha3.5:  Active development of this code has been stopped --
11I'm working on a complete reimplementation -- but folks have found some
12minor portability glitches and the like, hence this release to fix them.
13One penalty:  slightly reduced compatibility with old compilers, because
14the ANSI C `unsigned long' type and `ul' constant suffix are used in a
15few places (I could avoid this but it would be considerably more work).
16
17New in alpha3.4:  The complex bug alluded to below has been fixed (in a
18slightly kludgey temporary way that may hurt efficiency a bit; this is
19another "get it out the door for 4.4" release).  The tests at the end of
20the tests file have accordingly been uncommented.  The primary sign of
21the bug was that something like a?b matching ab matched b rather than ab.
22(The bug was essentially specific to this exact situation, else it would
23have shown up earlier.)
24
25New in alpha3.3:  The definition of word boundaries has been altered
26slightly, to more closely match the usual programming notion that "_"
27is an alphabetic.  Stuff used for pre-ANSI systems is now in a subdir,
28and the makefile no longer alludes to it in mysterious ways.  The
29makefile has generally been cleaned up some.  Fixes have been made
30(again!) so that the regression test will run without -DREDEBUG, at
31the cost of weaker checking.  A workaround for a bug in some folks'
32<assert.h> has been added.  And some more things have been added to
33tests, including a couple right at the end which are commented out
34because the code currently flunks them (complex bug; fix coming).
35Plus the usual minor cleanup.
36
37New in alpha3.2:  Assorted bits of cleanup and portability improvement
38(the development base is now a BSDI system using GCC instead of an ancient
39Sun system, and the newer compiler exposed some glitches).  Fix for a
40serious bug that affected REs using many [] (including REG_ICASE REs
41because of the way they are implemented), *sometimes*, depending on
42memory-allocation patterns.  The header-file prototypes no longer name
43the parameters, avoiding possible name conflicts.  The possibility that
44some clot has defined CHAR_MIN as (say) `-128' instead of `(-128)' is
45now handled gracefully.  "uchar" is no longer used as an internal type
46name (too many people have the same idea).  Still the same old lousy
47performance, alas.
48
49New in alpha3.1:  Basically nothing, this release is just a bookkeeping
50convenience.  Stay tuned.
51
52New in alpha3.0:  Performance is no better, alas, but some fixes have been
53made and some functionality has been added.  (This is basically the "get
54it out the door in time for 4.4" release.)  One bug fix:  regfree() didn't
55free the main internal structure (how embarrassing).  It is now possible
56to put NULs in either the RE or the target string, using (resp.) a new
57REG_PEND flag and the old REG_STARTEND flag.  The REG_NOSPEC flag to
58regcomp() makes all characters ordinary, so you can match a literal
59string easily (this will become more useful when performance improves!).
60There are now primitives to match beginnings and ends of words, although
61the syntax is disgusting and so is the implementation.  The REG_ATOI
62debugging interface has changed a bit.  And there has been considerable
63internal cleanup of various kinds.
64
65New in alpha2.3:  Split change list out of README, and moved flags notes
66into Makefile.  Macro-ized the name of regex(7) in regex(3), since it has
67to change for 4.4BSD.  Cleanup work in engine.c, and some new regression
68tests to catch tricky cases thereof.
69
70New in alpha2.2:  Out-of-date manpages updated.  Regerror() acquires two
71small extensions -- REG_ITOA and REG_ATOI -- which avoid debugging kludges
72in my own test program and might be useful to others for similar purposes.
73The regression test will now compile (and run) without REDEBUG.  The
74BRE \$ bug is fixed.  Most uses of "uchar" are gone; it's all chars now.
75Char/uchar parameters are now written int/unsigned, to avoid possible
76portability problems with unpromoted parameters.  Some unsigned casts have
77been introduced to minimize portability problems with shifting into sign
78bits.
79
80New in alpha2.1:  Lots of little stuff, cleanup and fixes.  The one big
81thing is that regex.h is now generated, using mkh, rather than being
82supplied in the distribution; due to circularities in dependencies,
83you have to build regex.h explicitly by "make h".  The two known bugs
84have been fixed (and the regression test now checks for them), as has a
85problem with assertions not being suppressed in the absence of REDEBUG.
86No performance work yet.
87
88New in alpha2:  Backslash-anything is an ordinary character, not an
89error (except, of course, for the handful of backslashed metacharacters
90in BREs), which should reduce script breakage.  The regression test
91checks *where* null strings are supposed to match, and has generally
92been tightened up somewhat.  Small bug fixes in parameter passing (not
93harmful, but technically errors) and some other areas.  Debugging
94invoked by defining REDEBUG rather than not defining NDEBUG.
95
96New in alpha+3:  full prototyping for internal routines, using a little
97helper program, mkh, which extracts prototypes given in stylized comments.
98More minor cleanup.  Buglet fix:  it's CHAR_BIT, not CHAR_BITS.  Simple
99pre-screening of input when a literal string is known to be part of the
100RE; this does wonders for performance.
101
102New in alpha+2:  minor bits of cleanup.  Notably, the number "32" for the
103word width isn't hardwired into regexec.c any more, the public header
104file prototypes the functions if __STDC__ is defined, and some small typos
105in the manpages have been fixed.
106
107New in alpha+1:  improvements to the manual pages, and an important
108extension, the REG_STARTEND option to regexec().
109