GNU Guile 1.8.4 released

[Ludovic Courtès]

We are pleased to announce GNU Guile release 1.8.4.  This is the next
maintenance release for the 1.8 stable series.

You can find it here:

  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.8.4.tar.gz
  SHA1 hash: 1e80fe242acfde2bfa39fd1e8409a8f010e24e2b

A GPG detached signature of the package is available at:

  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.8.4.tar.gz.sig

The Guile web page is located at http://www.gnu.org/software/guile,
and among other things, it contains a link to the Guile FAQ and
pointers to the mailing lists.

Guile is an interpreter for the Scheme programming language, with
support for many SRFIs, packaged for use in a wide variety of
environments.  In addition to implementing the R5RS Scheme standard,
Guile includes a module system, full access to POSIX system calls,
networking support, multiple threads, dynamic linking, a foreign
function call interface, and powerful string processing.

Guile can run interactively or as a script interpreter, and is also
packaged as a library so that applications can easily incorporate a
complete Scheme interpreter.  An application can use Guile as an
extension language, a clean and powerful configuration language, or as
multi-purpose "glue" to connect primitives provided by the
application.  It is easy to call Scheme code from C code and vice
versa.  Applications can add new functions, data types, control
structures, and even syntax to Guile, to create a domain-specific
language tailored to the task at hand.

This is primarily a bugfix release.  Here are the highlights, taken from
the `NEWS' file:

  - Bugs fixed

   - CR (ASCII 0x0d) is (again) recognized as a token delimiter by the
     reader
   - Fixed a segmentation fault which occurred when displaying the
     backtrace of a stack with a promise object (made by `delay') in it
   - Make `accept' leave guile mode while blocking
   - `scm_c_read ()' and `scm_c_write ()' now type-check their port
     argument
   - Fixed a build problem on AIX (use of func_data identifier)
   - Fixed a segmentation fault which occurred when hashx-ref or
     hashx-set! was called with an associator proc that returns neither
     a pair nor #f.
   - Secondary threads now always return a valid module for
     (current-module).
   - Avoid MacOS build problems caused by incorrect combination of "64"
     system and library calls.
   - `guile-snarf' now honors `$TMPDIR'
   - `guile-config compile' now reports CPPFLAGS used at compile-time
   - Fixed build with Sun Studio (Solaris 9)
   - Fixed wrong-type-arg errors when creating zero length SRFI-4
     uniform vectors on AIX.
   - Fixed a deadlock that occurs upon GC with multiple threads.
   - Fixed compile problem with GCC on Solaris and AIX (use of _Complex_I)
   - Fixed autotool-derived build problems on AIX 6.1.
   - Fixed NetBSD/alpha support
   - Fixed MacOS build problem caused by use of rl_get_keymap(_name)

  - New modules (see the manual for details)

   - `(srfi srfi-69)'

  - Documentation fixes and improvements

   - Removed premature breakpoint documentation
   - More about Guile's default *random-state* variable
   - GOOPS: more about how to use `next-method'

  - Changes to the distribution

   - Corrected a few files that referred incorrectly to the old GPL +
     special exception licence
   - Removed unnecessary extra copies of COPYING*


Any bugs found in this release will be addressed by further bugfix
releases numbered 1.8.*.

You can follow Guile development in CVS and on the Guile mailing lists
(see ANON-CVS and HACKING).  Guile builds from the development branch
of CVS will have version number 1.9.0.

Guile versions with an odd middle number, e.g., 1.9.*, are unstable
development versions.  Even middle numbers indicate stable versions.
This has been the case since the 1.3.* series.

Please send bug reports to address@hidden'.


Ludovic Courtès, on behalf of the Guile team.