[fpc-pascal]FPC version 1.0.6 released.

[Michael.VanCanneyt at Wisa.be]

Hello,

The FPC team is pleased to announce the immediate release of FPC v1.0.6,
an updated and fixed version of the previous v1.0 release v1.0.4 which was
released in early 2001.

Many parts of v1.0.6 have been available for some time in the form of
snapshots, which have been used and extensively tested. They have also
been tested for the last few weeks as a pre release as a result of
which some further fixes and minor improvements have been made.

The versions available are Dos (Go32v2), Win32 (works on Win9x, WinNT,
Win2000, WinXP), Linux, OS/2, FreeBSD, BeOS, SunOS/Solaris (beta).
Versions for QNX and NetBSD (beta) should follow soon.

These are available from the www site www.freepascal.org:

http://www.freepascal.org/sdown.html

(A FTP user limit is in effect. Please select a mirror close to you.)

and from the named folders on the ftp site:

ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist

and in the appropriate sub folder (alphabetically):
BeOS:   ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/beos-1.0.6
BSD:    ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/freebsd-1.0.6
DOS:    ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/dos-1.0.6
Linux:  ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/linux-1.0.6
OS/2    ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/os2-1.0.6
SunOS:  ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/sunos-1.0.6
Win32:  ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/win32-1.0.6
QNX:    ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/qnx-1.0.6 (will follow soon)

Most of the distributions are packaged both as a single large zip and as
separate smaller zips. They will also be available from the FPC mirrors,
although it may take up to a week for all of the mirrors to get the
release or any updates.

Please note that only a limited number of simultaneous ftp accesses
to the ftp site is allowed, so if your access is rejected you may
need to try again later or to try one of the mirrors.

Please report any problems (or unwanted 'features') to the FPC-devel
mailing list, together with your operating system name, the FPC file
name & date, description of the problem and a small fragment of the
code that shows the problem if possible.

Alternatively report faults via the FPC web site bug facility.
The easier it is for the developers to reproduce the fault,
the faster it will be fixed.

The FPC team will continue to produce fixes for v1.0.6 in the form of
regular (eg daily/weekly) (v1.0.7) snapshots. These will available from
ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/snapshot/v10.

The FPC team prefers that you check to see if faults have been corrected by
downloading these before reporting a fault.

Now that v1.0.6 is released, work will be concentrated on v1.1 of the
compiler, which will eventually form the v1.2 release.

It not only includes the fixes from 1.0.x, but also includes a lot of new
features such as 64bit integer constant support, a more modular code
generator for easier porting, a much improved optimizer and support for
newer Delphi features such as dynamic arrays, multithreading and
interfaces, and increased syntactic compability with newer Delphi
versions.

See http://www.freepascal.org/future.html for a list of planned new
features.

Regular (i.e. daily/weekly) snapshots of v1.1 will be available from
ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/snapshot

Here is a summary of the updates & major fixes since the v1.0.4 release:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Compiler:
  + NetBSD, BeOS, QNX and Sunos/Solaris for i386 support
  + m68k code generator (beta quality)
  * ppc386.cfg renamed to fpc.cfg
  * fpu overflow fixed
  * better typecast checking
  * better checking if passing a constant to a variable argument
  * procedure variable handling fixes
  * procedure inlining fixes
  * shared library has now initialization of the rtl
  * failed execution of tools (assembler, linker) now give errors
  * range checking now works correctly for cardinal and 64 bit operations
  * fixed crashing on 386 processors
  * fixed a lot of reported bugs

IDE:
  + regular expressions for find
  + disassembler window
  + libgdb 5.1.1 for Go32v2 & Win32 (better debug)
  * winXP/Win2000 fixes
  * fixed a lot of reported bugs

RTL:
  + NetBSD, BeOS, QNX and Sunos/Solaris for i386 support
  + added PathDelim,DriveDelim,PathSep variables
  + keyboard, mouse and video units updates
  * append() returns error if file doesn't exists
  * winXP fixes for go32v2 mouse
  * lot of updates to make the RTL easier to port
  * bug fixes

FCL:
  * small bug fixes

Docs:
  + compiler internals documentation (available through ftp site)
  * programmer's reference update

Utils:
  * h2pas updates
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Enjoy !

The FPC team.