Swarm 1.0.3 Available

[glen e. p. ropella]

To the collectively evolving,

I'v just put up the 1.0.3 release of Swarm on the ftp site.  I
even managed to make binaries for sun, linux, hp, and alpha.
(That doesn't mean they all work, however. [grin])  I'm about
half way through updating the swarmdocs from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3.
I don't know if I'll finish the other half before I go out of
town Friday.  The major functionality difference is in the
random library, and Sven has placed plenty of ascii documentation
in $(SWARMHOME)/src/random/docs.  So, I don't think anyone will
suffer too badly if I don't get the docs finished before next
week.

Anyway, the relese page has the details
(http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/release.html)

But, here are the Release-Notes just to whet your appetite.

           ================================================
                Release Notes for Swarm Version 1.0.3

 1. In the activity library, a bug in the internal scheduling of a swarm
    has been fixed, so that internally created concurrent actions are
    correctly freed when they have completed.  (These actions are
    automaticallly created whenever multiple schedules running happen
    to be scheduled at the same time within a swarm.)

 2. Logic for the "remove" method in schedules has been revised to work
    correctly for two-level schedules, in which a concurrent schedule at
    the second level is created externally to hold times at a finer
    granularity than the times in a containing schedule.

 3. The AutoDrop action is automatically passed through from a containing
    schedule to any concurrent group it contains.  Previously, the AutoDrop
    option had to be specified explicitly on a special concurrent group
    type initialized with the schedule.  Now the AutoDrop option for any
    concurrent groups is automatically set to the same as the schedule in
    which it is contained.  (Any existing setting of the option on the
    concurrent group type is ignored.)

 4. A bug that returned an incorrect value from "getAutoDrop" on an
    ActionGroup or Schedule has been fixed.

 5. The defobj, collections, and activity libraries have been fixed to
    avoid sending messages to a nil receiver during library initialization.
    Other swarm libraries remain free of this.  Good practice in debugging
    is to always run with a gdb breakpoint, or with a patched version of the
    gcc Objective C library (libobjc.a), to intercept any call to a nil
    message receiver.  (See swarm debugging hints in the Swarm documentation
    for more information.)

 6. Debugging print messages have been restructured internally.  The
    functions xprint, xprintid, xfprint, and xfprintid remain callable
    from the debugger.  The internal methods that these functions call have
    been changed to be consistent in the way in which they direct output.

 7. Additional "describe" methods have been coded for schedule-related
    objects in the activity library.  These methods (callable from gdb
    via "xprint") provide an initial, rudimentary form of schedule
    "browse" capability.  To use the capability, simply call the function
    xfprint from the gdb command line: "call xfprint(aSchedule)" where the
    argument can be any valid schedule or action group.

 8. A macro named PTRFMT is defined in defobj.h to print only the number
    of significant hexadecimal digits in a pointer-sized word.  This macro is
    used by debugging print messages to avoid printing double the number of
    required digits on a machine with 32-bit words.  (The precision had been
    expanded in swarm-1.0.2 to run on 64-bit pointer architectures.)

 9. Internal changes have been to some methods to use appropriate integer
    argument types.

10. Added Nelson Minar's Discrete2d changes that save and load a Discrete2d
    space in PGM format.

11. Incorporated Jason Jay's fix to ObjectLoader in reading single
    quoted strings.

12. Added Manor Askenazi's bug fix and enhancements to QSort. (Ref.
    http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/archive/list-archive.9708/0149.html)

13. This release includes Random v0.7, written by Sven Thommesen.  This 
    version adds several new bit generators and distributions and
    rearranges the library.  (Ref.
    $SWARMHOME/src/random/docs/WHATS.CHANGED.in.0.7 and WHATS.NEW.in.0.7)

14. Another command line option has been added so that a user can run
    in one of two modes with respect to the random number generation.
    By default, two separate runs of a model will use the same seed for
    the default random number generators.  This facilitates debugging
    applications without forcing the user to create their own generator.
    By invoking the applications with the "-varySeed" command line option,
    the seed for any given run will be different from another run for
    the default generators.

15. Another command line option has been added to initSwarm to provide
    quick&dirty help on the available command line options.  If a user
    invokes an application with the "-help" command line flag, this 
    help text will appear.

-- 
{glen e. p. ropella <address@hidden> |  Send lawyers, guns, and money!  }
{Hive Drone, SFI Swarm Project         |            Hail Eris!            }
{http://www.trail.com/~gepr/home.html  |               =><=               }