These notes correspond to *pcl-system-date* "4/29/87 prime April 29, 1987". The notes from the last release are stored as 4-21-notes.text This release runs in: ExCL Lucid Symbolics Common Lisp (Genera) Vaxlisp (2.0) Xerox Common Lisp (Lyric Release) Kyoto Common Lisp (5.2) TI Common Lisp (Release 3) CMU Lisp (nee Spice) should be working soon, I will announce another release at that time. TI release 2 should also be working soon, I will announce that when it happens. Note once again, that Xerox Lisp users should FTP all the source files from /pub/pcl/ as well as all the dfasl files from /pub/pcl/xerox/. Included in the xerox specific directory is a file called PCL-ENV, which provides some simple environment support for using PCL in Xerox Lisp. You must load PCL BEFORE loading pcl-env. MAJOR CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE: make has been renamed to make-instance make-instance has been renamed to allocate-instance for compatibility, make can continue to be used as a synonym for make-instance. unfortunately, code which used to call make-instance must be converted. I would actually suggest that you do both of these name changes right away. Two passes through the code using Query Replace seems to work quite well (changing make-instance to allocate-instance and then make to make-instance.) I was able to change all of PCL in about 10 minutes that way. --- all functions and generic functions whose name included the string "get-slot" have been renamed. Basically, get-slot was replaced everywhere it appeared with slot-value. get-slot itself still exists for compatibility, but you should start converting your code to use slot-value. OTHER CHANGES in this release: There is a new file called PKG which does the exports for PCL. PCL now exports fewer symbols than before. Specifically, PCL now exports only those symbols documented in the CLOS spec chapters 1 and 2. This means that some symbols which may be needed by some programs are not exported. A good example is print-instance. print-instance is not exported and since print-instance has not yet been renamed to print-object programs which define methods on print-instance may want to import that symbol. --- pcl should load faster in this release. In particular, the file fixup should load in less than half the time it did before. This release should load in something like 80% of the time it took in the last release. Remember, these numbers are only for comparison, your mileage may vary. --- This release of PCL, as well as the last one, has *pcl-system-date* which presents the date in both mm/dd/yy and Month day year format.