Fudgets

Version h9 Release Notes

SUMMARY OF CHANGES

This file describes the most important changes since the previous release.

Changes from the 8th (Jan 95) to the 9th (July 95) hackers' release

Lots of things have changed. Programs that worked with release h8 are not likely to work with this release without changes, unfortunately. (Some of these changes can be performed automatically, though. See below.) The motivation for most these changes is to make the library easier to use, more flexible and easier to extend in a backwards compatible way.

There are two major improvements:

To get rid of a lot of hard-to-remember parameters that most fudgets have, we have introduced a mechanism for parameters with default values. This means that you now write, e.g.,
```
       b1 = buttonF "One"			-- version h9
       b2 = buttonF' (setFont "fixed") "Two" 	-- version h9
```
instead of
```
       b1 = buttonF Nothing buttonFont [] "One" -- version h8
       b2 = buttonF Nothing "fixed" [] "Two"    -- version h8
```
For more info, see the refence manual entry for Customiser.
The layout system has been improved. There now is an automatic layout mechanism that allows you to write and run a first version of your program without having to worry about layout at all. You can then add layout information where the layout chosen by the automatic system isn't adequate.

Other changes:

There are now two modules that can be imported: AllFudgets and Fudgets The former contains everything exported from the fudget library. The latter is half the size of the former and contains only the stuff likely to be useful to application programmers. Importing Fudgets instead of AllFudgets when possible speeds up compilation noticeably.
Most arguments of type Maybe Rect for layout have been removed, since you always supplied Nothing to use dynamic layout.
Many types and functions have changed names. We supply the program fudApplyChanges to consistently subsitute the new names for the old names to make it easier to adapt old programs to this release. The following changes and many more are taken care of by this program:
- All uses of the Sum type has been replaced by the Either type. The constructors called Left and Right instead of Inl and Inr. Occurences of Sum, Inl or Inr in function names have changed to Either, Left or Right, respectively.
- putF, putK & putSP changed.
- Loop combinators, e.g., loopThroughRightF changed.
- Map functions (homomorphisms) now have names starting with 'map' instead of just 'a'. For example, aMaybe changed to mapMaybe.
Click-to-Type is now on by default. When running a fudget program it can be switched of by supplying the flag -ctt no on the command line. (Remember to put a single - before the first flag.)
Various other changes. See hsrc/CHANGES9 in the source distribution for a more complete list.
The combinators >+#< and >==#< have not changed. New combinators >#+< and >#==< have been introduced. In the Båstad Spring School Lecture Notes the former names are wrongly used where the new ones should have been used.

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