Release notes for Model 204 version 7.9 (Beta)

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION! These release notes list the enhancements and other changes contained in Model 204 version 7.9, which is still in development. Until the commercial release of the software, Rocket reserves the right to add to, remove, or change anything described herein.

Overview

These release notes contain installation and features information for the Rocket Model 204 version 7.9 release. Before beginning your installation, please read through this information about product installation and changes.

New in this release

Regular expression engine enhancements

The regular expression engine can now produce traces of regular expression processing to help debug and optimize regular expressions. There are new user parameters REGEXTR and MREGEXTR, as well as a new "t" option on regex method and $function invocations to control this tracing.

The regular expression engine now supports back references. The following illustrates the use of a back reference (\1 in the example) to display all lines in procedure FOO where the left side of an assignment also appears on the right side. Note that this example is somewhat simplistic in that it it doesn't account for continuation lines and might not be what one wants if the left side of an assignment is an object member or array element.

b %i is float %sl is object stringlist %sl = new $procopn("FOO", "FOOPROC") %sl:appendOpenProcedure %i = 1 repeat while %i le %sl:count %i = %sl:regexLocate("(%[a-z._$]+) *=.*\1", %i, options="i") if %i eq 0 then loop end; end if print %ls(%i) %i = %i + 1 end repeat end

New Regex class

Regular expressions can now be compiled into Regex objects. This can be useful in allowing the compilations of dynamically generated regular expressions to be reused without recompilation. There is a new system parameter, REGXSTBL that controls how much STBL space is to be reserved for each Regex object.

New HDRCTL setting for DAEMONS

Prior to V7.9, daemons did not output header lines. Starting with V7.9, HDRCTL may be set to 8 to force daemons to output header lines.

New MSGCTLU command to allow message changes by non-managers

Message behavior may now be changed by non-managers effecting the user's thread only. For instance, anyone may now produce a snap on a specific message within their thread which does not affect anyone else. See MSGCTLU command for more details.

Debugger enhancements

Enhancements have been made for debugging applications that use IMAGEs to all of Model 204 debuggers (Janus Debugger, Tn3270 Debugger and SoftSpy).

Performance enhancements

Regex Rewrite

The regular expression engine has been completely rewritten to make it significantly faster. Tests indicate simple regex is at least three times as fast as the earlier regular expression engine, and 10 times or more faster for more complex regular expressions. In addition, constant regular expressions are now compiled when the containing procedure is compiled to eliminate the runtime cost of regular expression compilation and to detect errors in regular expressions at SOUL compile-time lather than evaluation time.

ATB Storage Usage Greatly Increased

Many more M204 data structures can be placed in ATB storage with 7.9. Probably the most important of these is the Push Down List (PDL).

New and changed messages

See New and updated messages in Model 204 version 7.9 for details.