[Chicken-users] dev-snapshot 4.6.3

[Felix]

Hello!


A new development snapshot for CHICKEN 4.6.3 should be available
shortly. Please note that this version incorporates quite extensive
changes and may include bugs or incompatibilities. In particular, the
`regex' libray unit has been replaced with a new `irregex' unit and
the old regular-expression API is not provided by the core system
anymore. The old API is available as an extension (named,
surprisingly, `regex'). Extensions that do stuff like `(declare (uses
... regex ...))' will break, and with the exception of one egg
(easyffi), extensions that use the old API have not yet updated
dependencies in their .meta files. The next Salmonella run should
uncover all extensions that are problematic, though.

The news:

- the `regex' library unit has been removed and is separately
  available as an extension which should be fully backwards-
  compatible
- `irregex' is now a core library unit and replaces the 
  `regex' API
- `-frwapv' has been added to the default C compiler options
- configuration-header fix for BSD systems (thanks to Peter Bex
  and Christian Kellermann)
- added support for `pointer-vectors' (unit `lolevel'):
  make-pointer-vector
  pointer-vector?
  pointer-vector-length
  pointer-vector-ref
  pointer-vector-set!
- added new foreign type `poiner-vector' which maps to `void **'
- new "implicit renaming" macro facility contributed by Peter Bex
  (see `ir-macro-transformer')
- the warning shown when unimported identifiers are used in 
  compiled modules now also shows the name of the procedure where
  the identifier is referenced (suggested by Alaric Snell-Pym)
- the deprecated `random-seed' function has been removed
- parameters are now settable and can be modified using `set!'
  (SRFI-17)
- the implementation of overflow-detection for arithmetic operations
  on fixnums have been replaced and now allow using the full 63-bit
  range of fixnums on 64-bit systems
- fixed serious inlining-bug (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)


cheers,
felix