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Release 2.5 (December, 1994)

Release 2.5 comprised the following changes to Release 2.4:

• Complex numbers, complex and dcomplex, were added to Glish along with the relevant functions:
  • complex(x,y), § 10.3, page .
  • imag(x), § 10.3, page .
  • real(x), § 10.3, page .
  • conj(x), § 10.3, page .
  • arg(x), § 10.3, page .
  • is_complex(x), § 10.1, page .
  • is_dcomplex(x), § 10.1, page .
  • as_complex(x), § 10.2, page .
  • as_dcomplex(x), § 10.2, page .
  See § 3.2, § 10.3, and § 3.2.1 for details.

• Attributes were added to Glish. These allow extra information to be attached to Glish values. (See § 3.5, page  for more information.)

• Multi-dimensional arrays were added to Glish. These arrays were implemented using attributes. Users can access single elements, slices, or a set of unrelated array elements using the subscript operator. (See 3.7 for more information.)

• Value subreferences were added for vector types. These allow users to create references to only a portion of another vector or array. Once created, subreferences can be used much like whole-value references. (See § 3.8.2, page  for more information.)

• There were several changes to default arguments for functions. In particular, now defaulted arguments can be omitted as follows:

      func one(a=1, b=2, c=3, d=4) [a, b, c, d]
      one(5,,4)
  

  This invocation invokes one with the default values for the second and fourth arguments. (See § 6.4.2, page .)

  The ellipsis can also have default values:

      func two(...=0) [...]
      two(5,,6)
  

  Here, the second argument to two gets the default value. (See § 6.4.4, page  for more information.) This example also shows how the ellipsis are now used to construct an array, when all of the arguments are numeric types. (See § 6.4.4, page  for more information.)

  Finally, there is a new missing() function which returns a boolean vector indicating which parameters received default values. (See § 6.5, page .)

• Some predefined functions were added:
  • asin(x), § 10.3, page .
  • acos(x), § 10.3, page .
  • atan(x), § 10.3, page .
  • prod(...), § 10.3, page .
  asin(x), acos(x), and atan(x) do not yet work for complex types.

• Some old functions were improved, mostly to operate on an arbitrary number of arguments.
  • sum(...), § 10.3, page .
  • range(...), § 10.3, page .
  • max(...), § 10.3, page .
  • min(...), § 10.3, page .
  • rep(x,y), § 10.3, page .
  • length(...), § 10.3, page .

• Command line editing was added using the editline library by Simmule Turner and Rich Salz (see the editline/README distribution file for copyright and other information). (See § 14, page  for more information about command line editing in Glish.)

• All of the above changes were contributed by Darrell Schiebel.

• Glish now has byte and short types (§ 3.2, page ), corresponding to the C types of unsigned char and short. These types include the usual as_byte, is_short, etc. functions. They were contributed by Chris Saltmarsh.

• The sync(c) function can be called to synchronize a Glish script's execution with that of client c (§ 10.9, page ).

• The functions sort(x) (§ 10.3, page ), sort_pair(x,y) (§ 10.3, page ), and order(x) (§ 10.3, page ) provide support for sorting numeric and string types.

• The precedence of the val, const, and ref operators has been increased (§ 4.6, page ).

• The glish.init file is now compiled into the interpreter rather than located at run-time (§ 16.6, page ).

• A new Client member function, Error, is used to report an error (particularly in a recently received event) (§ 15.5, page ).

• A new Client member function, ReplyPending, returns true if the client has a request/reply pending and false otherwise (§ 15.5, page ).

• The Client member function AddInputMask now returns the number of new fd's it added to the mask.

• The Client member function HasSequencerConnection is now called HasInterpreterConnection.

• A Client::PostEvent variant has been added which does printf-style formatting but with two string arguments instead of just one (§ 15.5, page ).

• The GlishEvent class has been spruced up a bit, and now supports a member function int IsRequest() const, which returns true if the event was a request and false otherwise (§ 15.3, page ).

• The Value associated with an event in Client::PostEvent can now be nil, if you know it won't be used (§ 15.5, page ).

• Clients executed ``stand-alone'' (not from within a Glish script) now default to -noglish behavior, in which a call to NextEvent returns nil (``no more events''). To enable (for debugging purposes) reading events from stdin and writing them to stdout, you must explicitly specify the -glish flag (§ 16.4, page ).

• Use of the bool type in the Client and Value class libraries has now in many cases been replaced by int. In the remaining cases, glish_bool must be used. The abbreviations of true and false for glish_true and glish_false are no longer available (§ 15.7.1, page ).