[m-dev.] for review: create new web pages for 0.10 release

[Fergus Henderson]

On 21-Feb-2001, Zoltan Somogyi <zs at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 
> There are several other changes we should mention.
> 
> - The procedural debugger has been improved in several respects:
>   - It has some new commands: next, excp.

The `excp' command is undocumented; the name of the command which is
document in the user guide is `exception'.  So I've used the name
`exception' in the NEWS file.

>   - It can now print parts of terms, and fields of terms can be specified by
>     field name as well as by position number.
>   - It can perform retry across I/O.

Those two aren't documented in the Mercury User's Guide, but should be.
Could you fix that, please?

The current documentation for the "retry" command is not correct
anymore.

> - The declarative debugger has been improved in several respects:
>   - It has a greatly improved user interface.
>   - It can now handle the debugging of very large computations.
> - The compiler now recognizes assertions for associativity and for
>   order-independent update, and uses them to introduce accumulators.
> - The runtime system and compiler generated code are now name space clean.

For reasons discussed in my earlier mail I won't include those ones.

> - The compiler now has a new optimization, enabled by --unneeded-code.

It's probably worth documenting that, but the documentation should
give a brief description of what the optimization does, and should
refer the reader to where they can find more.  I'm not sure how to
do it right, so I'll leave it out for the moment.

Anyway, here's some changes to the NEWS file in response to your
comments.

----------

Estimated hours taken: 1

NEWS:
	Document some stuff that had previously been forgotten.

Workspace: /home/venus/fjh/ws-venus2/mercury
Index: NEWS
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/mercury1/repository/mercury/NEWS,v
retrieving revision 1.201
diff -u -d -r1.201 NEWS
--- NEWS	2001/02/19 10:41:47	1.201
+++ NEWS	2001/02/21 17:35:05
@@ -296,11 +296,34 @@
   PCs running Linux).  But in theory it should work fine on other
   platforms too.
 
+* The old back-end now generates faster code at low optimization levels.
+
+* The compiler is now a little bit faster.
+
 * The names of some of the `--enable-*' options to `configure' have changed.
 
   See the output of `configure --help' for details.
 
 Changes to the development environment:
+
+* The debugger has been improved in several respects:
+
+  - It has some new forward movement commands:
+    * `next' steps over a call, like gdb's `next' command;
+    * `exception' skips forward until an exception is thrown.
+  - It can perform retry across I/O.
+  - It can now print parts of terms, and fields of terms can be
+    specified by field name as well as by position number.
+  - It has a more flexible mechanism for setting browsing parameters.
+  - It now handles ambiguous procedure specifications in "break"
+    commands gracefully.
+  - The state of the debugger can now be saved and restored, using the
+    `save' and `source' commands (respectively).
+
+  For details, see the documentation of the `next', `exception',
+  `break', `set', and `save' commands in the "Debugger commands" section
+  of the "Debugging" chapter of the Mercury User's Guide.  (The changes
+  to `retry' and `print' have unfortunately not been documented yet.)
 
 * Several improvements have been made to `mtags' to make it easier to
   find predicate/function definitions and to improve support for

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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