[ANN] Mozart 1.2.1 released

[Leif Kornstaedt]

We are pleased to announce the release of Mozart 1.2.1.
This is an important bug-fix release, with some enhancements,
and is fully backward compatible with Mozart 1.2.0.

We strongly encourage all users to upgrade to Mozart 1.2.1.

It is now available for download from

   http://www.mozart-oz.org/

(Unfortunately, our mirror sites are currently unavailable.)

IMPORTANT ISSUES

  * A severe bug in record unification that has been introduced
    in 1.2.0 is fixed.

  * Fixed incorrect variable aliasing detection on Windows
    (resulted in weaker propagation, therefore in different and
    larger search trees).

  * Many improvements in the Windows port, in particular for
    subprocesses, finally correctly enabling oztool and ozmake.

  * Both domain- and bounds-consistent variants of the alldifferent
    constraint for finite domains are available.

CHANGES

  * Inspector replaces Browser as default viewer in Explorer and Ozcar

  * The verbosity of printing variables can be controlled by the
    property 'print.verbose'

  * Mozart uses sorting in many important places (record construction,
    dictionaries, finite domains, many finite domain propagators).
    All uses of sorting now share a single, efficient and robust
    implementation

  * Documented FD.distinctD (domain-consistent alldifferent) and added
    FD.distinctB (bounds-consistent alldifferent, naive quadratic version)

BUG FIXES IN DETAIL

  record unification
     an invalid optimization was introduced in 1.2.0 that affected
     speculative unification of records

  variable aliasing detection (Windows)
     variable aliasing detection was inoperative.  As a result
     propagation was weaker.  This could be observed with the
     SEND+MORE=MONEY example which produced a larger search tree

  oztool (Windows)
     `oztool ld' now also works under Cygwin (not only Mingw32).
     Furthermore, options are now accepted in any order, and
     options `-I', `-l', `-L' and `-s' are supported for gcc
     and Microsoft Visual C++

  OS.system and Open.pipe (Windows)
     OS.system was broken in 1.2.0 and has now been repaired;
     bug fixes in inheritance and closing of handles

  failed futures
     (dis)equality testing now correctly passes up exceptions.
     Value.byNeedFail is now careful to be non-requesting

  IO problems (Windows 2000 Service Pack 2)
     system would freeze if `ws2_32.dll' was not loaded

  entailment/disentailment
     propagators are now again included in the suspension count

  Combinator.reify
     fixed bug related to merging

  Schedule.cumulative
     fixed bug related to sorting task intervals

MISCELLANEOUS

  * Cross-compilation is no longer necessary to build Mozart
    for Windows.  The entire system can now be natively compiled
    on Windows under the Cygwin environment.
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Please send submissions to announce at mozart-oz.org
and administriva mail to announce-request at mozart-oz.org.
The Mozart Oz web site is at http://www.mozart-oz.org/.