Updated the "what's new" and todo chapters.

doc/scsh-manual/THANKS

@@ -24,3 +24,5 @@ Shriram
 euler@lavielle.COM (Lutz Euler) 2/24/97
     Manual bugs and a bug in stdio->stdports.
 
+Alan Bawden 4/97
+    Lots of good bug reports and fixes.

doc/scsh-manual/changes.tex

@@ -1,13 +1,52 @@
 %&latex -*- latex -*-
 
-\chapter{Changes from the previous release}
+\chapter{Changes from previous releases}
 \label{sec:changes}
 
 \newcommand{\itam}[1]{\item {#1} \\}
 
+\section{Changes from the previous release}
+
 This section details changes that have been made in scsh since
 the previous release.
 
+Scsh is now much more robust.
+All known bugs have been fixed.
+There have been many improvements and extensions made.
+These new features and changes are listed below, in no particular order;
+the relevant sections of the manual give the full details.
+
+Scsh now supports complete {\Posix}, including signal handlers.
+Early autoreaping of child processes is now handled by a \ex{SIGCHLD}
+signal handler, so children are reaped as early as possible with no
+user intervention required.
+
+A functional static heap linker is included in this release.
+It is ugly, limited in functionality, and extremely slow, but it works.
+It can be used to build scsh binaries that start up instantly.
+
+The regular expression system has been sped up.
+Regular-expression compilation is now provided,
+and the \ex{awk} macro has been rewritten to pre-compile
+regexps used in rules outside the loop. 
+It is still, however, slower than it should be.
+
+Execing programs should be faster in this release, since we now use the
+\ex{CLOEXEC} status bit to get automatic closing of unrevealed
+port file descriptors.
+
+{scm}'s floating point support was inadvertently omitted from the last
+release. It has been reinstated.
+
+There is now a new command-line switch, \ex{-sfd \var{num}},
+which causes scsh to read its script from file descriptor \var{num}.
+
+
+\section{Changes from the penultimate release}
+
+This section details changes that have been made in scsh since
+the penultimate release.
+
 Scsh is now much more robust.
 All known bugs have been fixed.
 There have been many improvements and extensions made.
@@ -17,7 +56,7 @@ The sections below briefly describe these new features and changes;
 the relevant sections of the manual give the full details.
 
 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
-\section{New features}
+\subsection{New features}
 This release incorporates several new features into scsh.
 
 \begin{itemize}
@@ -85,7 +124,7 @@ space in the run-time heap.
 \end{itemize}
 
 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
-\section{Incompatible improvements}
+\subsection{Incompatible improvements}
 Some features of scsh have been improved in ways that are
 not backwards-compatible with previous releases.
 These changes should not affect most code;
@@ -205,7 +244,7 @@ changes of which to be aware are:
 
 
 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
-\section{Backwards-compatible improvements}
+\subsection{Backwards-compatible improvements}
 
 Some existing features in scsh have been improved in ways that will
 not effect existing code.

doc/scsh-manual/todo.tex

@@ -1,54 +1,49 @@
->%&latex -*- latex -*-
+%&latex -*- latex -*-
 
 \chapter{Todo}
-{\parindent 0pt
 
-We'd love to have have people implement these subsystems and
+There are always many, many improvements and extensions that could be
-fold them into the scsh release:
+made to scsh.
+We invite interested hackers to do any of them, and send us the code;
+we'll put you on the team.
+Visit the Scheme Underground Web page for more information on good hacks at
+\begin{tightinset}\verb|http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/su/|
+\end{tightinset}
+Scsh is a tool that lets you write fun programs that do real things in
+an elegant language; go wild.
+
 \begin{itemize}
+\item Threads. 
+\item An X gui interface. (Needs threads.)
+\item A better C function/data-structure interface. This is not easy.
 \item More network protocols. Telnet and ftp would be the most important.
 \item An ILU interface.
 \item An RPC system, with ``tail-recursion.''
-\item Interfaces to relational db's. This would be quite useful for
+\item Interfaces to relational db's. 
-      Web servers.
+      This would be quite useful for Web servers.
-\end{itemize}
+      An s-expression embedding of SQL would be a key design component
+      of such a system, along the lines of scsh's process notation or
+      \ex{awk} notation.
+\item Port Edwin, and emacs text editor written in MIT Scheme, to scsh.
+      Combine it with scsh's OS interfaces to make a visual shell.
+\item An \ex{expect} knock-off.
+\item A \ex{make} replacement, using scsh's process notation in the build
+      rules.
 
-Manual hacking:
+\item Manual hacking.
 \begin{itemize}
 \item The {\LaTeX} hackery needs yet another serious pass. Most importantly,
       long procedure ``declarations'' need to be  broken across two lines.
 
-\item Fix up 0-or-more and 1-or-more parameter typesetting, with subscripts.
-
-\item Parameter subscripts need to be made real subscripts.
-
 \item Soup up the markup processor, and redo manual in markup. Generate
-      LaTeX, HTML, and info versions. Alternatively, persuade some kind
+      {\LaTeX}, HTML, and info versions. Alternatively, persuade some kind
       soul to hand-port manual to HTML or info.
 \end{itemize}
 
-Job control, after \ex{jcontrol.scm}
+\item Job control, after \ex{jcontrol.scm}
 
-Static heaps; fast startup.
+\item Better static heap linker.
 
-Gnu readline lib.
+\item Gnu readline lib.
 
-Interrupt system.
+\end{itemize}
-
-Make it all coexist with S48 threads as well as can be done for Unix.
-The DEC SRC tech report gives a good discussion of the issues.
-
-Testing broken symlinks---new value for \var{chase?} flag?
-
-Rename and release \ex{ensure-file-name-is-\{non,\}directory}.
-
-More informative errno exception packets \& documentation for them.
-
-Other things should be available: hash tables, sort, list utils, pattern
-matchers. But things start to overload. The module system is the appropriate
-way to use these.
-
-Need to do file-control (\ie, \ex{fcntl()}).
-    \ex{fcntl} is ugly. 
-    Better to have a procedure for each different operation.
-}