Patches to PDL/81

From time-to-time, we may release patches to the PDL/81 processor in order to fix bugs or add features.

Before applying any of these patches, be sure that you are fully backed up so that you may easily revert to the previous version of PDL/81 if you do not like the results!

The patches below assume the use of Larry Wall's patch utility. Most, however, are simple enough that they may be applied by hand with a reasonable chance of success.

The patches will normally be in the form of UNIX tar files that have been compressed with the GNU gzip utility.

Patches to PDL/81 Version 2.0.908 -- 917

The patches in this group are all to the base 2.0.908 release and to subsequent releases through Build 917. Unless otherwise stated, the patches are independent of each other.

Year 2000 Updates

Year 2000 is not a catastrophic problem for PDL/81 as the only use of dates is in printing. However, dates such as January 1, 2000 will print in PDL/81 output as 1 Jan 100 instead of 1 Jan 2000.

This patch updates the ada, design, document language, and 2167 styles so that the year is printed as four digits.

We believe that this patch corrects the only Year 2000 problem. However, we cannot guarantee this and it is certainly possible that we have overlooked something.

You may:

• see the README file;

• download the patch as a text file, or

• download the patch and README file as a gzipped tar file (~2KB).

Other Bugs

This section provides various bug fixes.

Problem With Data Item Names

We have recently found that under Digital UNIX on the Alpha/AXP, PDL/81 incorrectly handles data item names. In particular, special characters such as parens and commas are treated as part of the name. It is possible that this may occur on other UNIX variants even though we have not encountered it. You may see the README file or you may download the patch (~1KB).

Additional Features

This section provides patches that add features to PDL/81.

Suppress Automatic Formatting in a Flow Segment

This patch adds the %AsIs and %NoAsIs commands. When used in a flow segment, the first of these turns off formatting, data definition, and data referencing. The second turns them back on. The commands are useful for delimiting areas of block comments.

You may see the README file or you may download the patch (~2KB).

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