

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.
