[21.5] Tweak etc/NEWS

[Hrvoje Niksic]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Hrvoje, you're maintainer-of-record for NEWS.  Do you mind if I
> fiddle with it, or would you prefer to maintain it directly from
> submissions?

Go ahead.  I've never considered myself the exclusive maintainer of
NEWS.  Experimenting with NEWS (such as Ben adding the summary) might
teach us how to better present new features.

> +* Changes in XEmacs 21.5
> +========================
> +
> +** Summary of user-visible changes:
> +
> +  -- Bignums have been implemented.
> +  -- Windows users have benefit of the full Win32 Unicode API.
> +  -- (in process) Xft provides antialiased fonts on X11.
> +
> +** Bignum implementation.
> +
> +Integer computations no longer overflow, rational arithmetic "just
> +works", and very precise floating point calculation is available.
> +This also means that large buffers (over 2^30 = 1GB) can be
> +manipulated.

I don't think we should advertise bignums as a major feature prior to
any benchmarking having been done.

The entry also doesn't mention that we depend on external MP
libraries, which is not at all obvious to me.  Python doesn't, and
neither do most other Lisp implementations (e.g. clisp, CMU CL).

We might want to include the source of GNU MP (or equivalent) in a
`lib/' directory and use it on machines that lack it on the system.
For implementational simplicity, we might also want to avoid
supporting BSD MP -- but that's obviously Jerry's call.

Once we do that, we can really say that we support bignums.