S  M  L   /   N  J

                  1  1  0  .  3  2      N  E  W  S
			
  		           December 22, 2000

			      WARNING

  	This version is intended for compiler hackers. The 
	version ought to be stable, however we have not run
	our full regression testing.

        http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/smlnj/index.html


Summary:

  This version is being used to check point a large number of changes 
  to MLRISC, which now uses infinite precision integers on all
  architectures. We have run the Basis regressions tests so the
  changes ought to be fairly robust.   

  There are a number of other CM, Basis, and Tool related changes as
  well. 

		--------------------------------

MLRISC:

  Fixes:
     This change fixes two problems:

       a) There was a proliferation of constructors in MLRISC to
	  handle integers of various sizes, e.g.

		LI of int   | LI32 of Int32.int  | LI64 of Int64.int
		...

	   which are all replaced with

		LI of IntInf.int

       b) There is the ever nagging question of cross compiling to
 	  64bits.  


  Compilation Speed:
    The x86 compiling the compiler is 9% slower than 110.31, however,
    a lot of this, and more, can be recovered. The compiler presently
    uses infinite precision in the front end (AST creation), which is 
    converted to 31 and 32 bit integers in the middle end (FLINT and CPS), 
    and then converted back to infinite precision in MLRISC (with the 
    current changes). 

    Infinite precision in the middle end (FLINT) will allow a uniform
    treatment of optimizations across words and integers of different
    widths/sizes. Currently, most optimizations are biased towards
    integers and words represented in 31 bits only.


  What's next:
    Not in chronological order:
	
	1. Use infinite precision in the middle end to allow a 
	cleaner and more uniform optimization module for arithmetic.

 	2. Support for the generation of infinite precision values
        in the back end.

	3. Changes to support the single toplevel declaration:

		structure LargeInt = IntInf

Basis:

    Added the missing bit level functions to the Basis IntInf structure.  


Tools:
    Improvements to the 'nowhere' tool to handle OR-patterns.
    The nowhere tool is a syntactic extension that allows for
    guarded patterns. See <tt> MLRISC/Tools/Doc/nowhere.tex</tt>.

CM:
  o Added a new "dir" tool to CM's toolset; this can simplify writing
    CM descriptions (see the manual)
  
  o Made some modifications to CM's "Tools" API and documented everything

  o CM now leaves exceptions (from the compiler) alone if they are not
    expected; this causes such exceptions to travel up to the top-level
    where they are reported as usual
  
  o Eliminated the "[wrote ...]" progress message in favor of reporting
    some size information for the generated binfile instead
  
  o Removed source code for some project-in-progress that is not ready
    for prime-time (yet)
  
  o Made anchor environments ("bind:"-option for class "cm") inter-operate
    in a more useful way with CMB.make