Beta release for gawk 5.2.0 now available

[Arnold Robbins]

This note is to announce the BETA release of GNU Awk 5.2.0.

It is available from:

        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk/gawk-5.1.65.tar.gz

This is a major release.

The important part of the NEWS file is below.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.

So, why do a beta release? So that you, yes you, the end user, can see
if anything I've done breaks gawk for you.  Then you can TELL ME ABOUT
IT so that I can fix it for the final release.

(The URL in the box below will be filled in before the final release.
In the meantime, see the included manual.)

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
arnold@skeeve.com
---------------------------------------------
   Copyright (C) 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
   
   Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
   are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
   notice and this notice are preserved.

Changes from 5.1.x to 5.2.0
---------------------------

*****************************************************************************
* MPFR mode (the -M option) is now ON PAROLE.  This feature is now being    *
* supported by a volunteer in the development team and not by the primary   *
* maintainer.  If this situation changes, then the feature will be removed. *
* For more information see https://......                                   *
*****************************************************************************

1. Infrastructure upgrades: Libtool 2.4.7.

2. Numeric scalars now compare in the same way as C for the relational
operators. Comparison order for sorting has not changed.  This only
makes a difference when comparing Infinity and NaN values with
regular numbers; it should not be noticeable most of the time.

3. If the AWK_HASH environment variable is set to "fnv1a" gawk will
use the FNV1-A hash function for associative arrays.

4. The CMake infrastructure has been removed. In the five years it was in
the tree, nobody used it, and it was not updated.

5. There is now a new function, mkbool(), that creates Boolean-typed
values.  These values *are* numbers, but they are also tagged as
Boolean. This is mainly for use with data exchange to/from languages
or environments that support real Boolean values. See the manual
for details.

6. As BWK awk has supported interval expressions since 2019, they are
now enabled even if --traditional is supplied. The -r/--re-interval option
remains, but it does nothing.

7. The rwarray extension has two new functions, writeall() and readall(),
for saving / restoring all of gawk's variables and arrays.

8. The new `gawkbug' script should be used for reporting bugs.

9. The manual page (doc/gawk.1) has been considerably reduced in size.
Wherever possible, details were replaced with references to the online
copy of the manual.

10. Gawk now supports Terence Kelly's "persistent malloc" (pma),
allowing gawk to preserve its variables, arrays and user-defined
functions between runs. THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE!

For more information, see the manual. A new pm-gawk.1 man page
is included, as is a separate user manual that focuses on the feature.

11. Support for OS/2 has been removed. It was not being actively
maintained.

12. Similarly, support for DJGPP has been removed. It also was not
being actively maintained.

13. VAX/VMS is no longer supported, as it can no longer be tested.
The files for it remain in the distribution but will be removed
eventually.

14. Some subtle issues with untyped array elements being passed to
functions have been fixed.

15. There have been numerous minor code cleanups and bug fixes. See the
    ChangeLog for details.

Changes from 5.1.1 to 5.1.x
---------------------------

1. Infrastructure upgrades: Automake 1.16.5, Texinfo 6.8.

2. The rwarray extension now supports writing and reading GMP and
   MPFR values. As a result, a bug in the API code was fixed.