Steven K. Graham has worked for Hewlett-Packard, served on the Faculty at UMKC, and is currently a Senior Engineer with CSI.
MicroEMACS Update
MicroEMACS CUG366 (two disks) updates a popular, portable, extensible CUG editor to a new version (3.11) and to new volumes in the C Users Group library (formerly volumes 197 and 198, version 3.9). The new version includes a new help system, a new windowing system supporting mulitple screens and mouse manipulation, portable file locking, support for more machines and systems, better handling of line terminators on input and output, customization of the characters considered to be part of a word, temporary pop-up windows for buffer lists (and similar information), improved debugging information on procedure crashes, accommodations for formatting languages, and more.MicroEMACS was begun by Dave Conroy in 1985, and then taken over by Daniel Lawrence (of Lafayette, Indiana), who is still supporting and enhancing it. MicroEMACS is supported on a variety of machines and operating systems, including MS-DOS, VMS, and UNIX (several versions).
GNU File and Text Utilities for MS-DOS
CUG367 (two disks) introduces ports of various GNU file and text utilities to MS-DOS. These files are a variety of utilities derived from the GNU File Utilities. Thorsten Ohl was instrumental in porting these utilities to MS-DOS, with additional work by David J. MacKenzie, with help from Jim Meyering, Brian Mathews, Bruce Evans, and others. These files are part of the GNUish MS-DOS project. Sources, man files, and executables are included for cat, chmod, cmp, cp, cut, dd, dir, head, ls, mkdir, mv, paste, rm, rmdir, tac, tail, touch. Source is also included for du. The routines are somewhat POSIX-compliant and at times improve on their UNIX counterparts in speed, options, and absence of arbitrary limits.
GNUlib for MS-DOS
CUG368 provides a library of GNU library routines and other support routines for MS-DOS, ported by Thorsten Ohl. Files include error.c, getopt.c, getopt.h, getopt1.c, glob.c, regex.c, regex.h. These are general purpose routines needed by almost all GNU programs. These files are identical to or derived from versions distributed with the file utilities (CUG367). patches can be used to recover original versions. _cwild.c provides command-line expansion, while ndir.c and ndir.h provide portable directory access. Other files include pwd.c, pwd.h, gnulib.h (some prototypes), xmalloc.c, xrealloc.c. The library would benefit from, but doesn't include a version of the obstack macros for all memory models.
Genitor and GATool bring Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to CUG
CUG369 provides the Genitor genetic algorithm tool, produced by Darrell Whitley and his team at Colorado State University. CUG370 brings a new genetic algorithm tool, GATool, to the public domain. GATool, an extensible, object-oriented C++ system, was written by Sara Lienau during her graduate work in Computer Science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. For more information on these programs, see the product review, "Evolution in Action" (page 75).