Dyalog APL V17.1 Issue 5 READ ME FIRST

• Summary
• Documentation

Dyalog has found defects in some of the code which has been optimised in 18.0. As a result of this Dyalog has decided to recommend that if you have not already upgraded to 18.0 and you do not urgently need the new features of 18.0 then you should skip 18.0 and wait for the subsequent release. Dyalog has therefore extended the support for 17.1 by an extra release cycle (typically a year). Given this extension we have also decided to release new installation images for 17.1 so that users can pick up all the fixes that have been applied to 17.1 thus far, both for the interpreter and all other parts of the product. More details can be found in the Dyalog blog at www.dyalog.com/blog/.

Issue 5 contains all the fixes and enhancements that have been made thus far to 17.1. Of particular note:

• Issue 5 contains a fix for 021545: After ⎕CT is altered, the first use of ⌈ or ⌊ produce bad results on non-scalars tolerantly equal to integer threshold values.
• On macOS Big Sur the HTMLRenderer is disabled by default. See /Applications/Dyalog-17.1.app/Contents/Resource/Dyalog/mapl for details on how to reenable it. It has been disabled on Big Sur as it was found that after a period of time the HTMLRenderer/Chromium Embedded Framework code would max out one CPU until the APL process was terminated.
• Zero Footprint RIDE has been added to all non-Windows platforms. In its most simple form, you can now start Zero footprint RIDE by specifying
        RIDE_INIT=HTTP:*:8080
  where 8080 can be replaced by any unused port.
  Additionally, if the interpreter finds a file called ride.ini in (on Windows) My Documents\Dyalog APL-64 17.1 Unicode Files, or (non-Windows) $HOME/.dyalog then it will use the settings in this file. This can be overridden by setting the CONFIG= option in RIDE_INIT. On Windows the directory name may differ depending on which width and edition of Dyalog you are using.
• Dyalog Version 17.1.38400 and later are notarised and thus should installs on macOS Catalina. However if you attempt to access ~/Documents from within Dyalog you may be presented with an operating system-generated message box asking you whether you want to allow Dyalog to access Documents (the same applies to various other directories). If you respond "no" and at a later date wish to change your mind, or if you don't get prompted, go to Apple->System Preferences->Security & Privacy. On the privacy tab select Full Disk Access and/or Files and Directories: you can amend the list of special directories which Dyalog 17.1 can have access to.
  
• MAJOR CHANGE! From 17.1 onwards we have changed the delivery method of Dyalog APL such that no matter what type of licence you have, you download the same installation image for your appropriate platform/version/width/edition. In future the serial number which you have been given will specify the type of licence that you have - see setup_readme.htm or the various Installation and Configuration Guides for more details.
• ⎕NINFO Variant Recurse can now take the value 2; this does not attempt to recurse down unreadable directories and thus does not error when it gets to such a directory. In earlier versions (11 12 ⎕NINFO) would return ¯1 for directories on all platforms; in 17.1 the correct result for (11 ⎕NINFO) is returned on all platforms, and the correct result for (12 ⎕NINFO) is returned on all non-Windows platforms. (12 ⎕NINFO) is proving more tricky on Windows !
  
• 16439: Where possible functions which scan directories, such as ⎕NINFO with recursion and/or wildcard now include the name of the file or directory in any error message that the function generates.
• 15985: ⎕CY now errors if the left argument is a vector of names; in previous versions it silently ignored all but the first name. Note that leading and trailing spaces are still permitted.
• The -r and -ride flags to the mapl script have been removed.
• The Syncfusion libraries on Windows have been updated; please note that they require .NET 4.6 to run. Please contact support if this causes you a problem.
• The HTMLRenderer is now supported on Linux (not Raspberry Pi), although various pre-requisites are required: see https://forums.dyalog.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1505 for more details. Note that if you are using the old tty interface then various warnings will appear when you use the HTMLRenderer; these are benign and can be ignored.
• In previous versions, if you attempted to write files to c:\windows, the Windows VirtualStore would be invoked, resulting in the file apparently being written to c:\windows where in actual fact it was written to %localappdata%\virtualstore. In 17.1 we have altered dyalog.exe.manifest so that you will now get an error when attempting to write to c:\windows. See the dyalog.exe.manifest for more information and options.
• ⎕NULLs and components from compressed component files that were created in Version 18.0 and later can be brought into Versions 16.0, 17.0 and 17.1 provided that the interpreters have been patched to revision 38151 or higher. Attempts to bring ⎕NULL or compressed component into earlier versions of Dyalog APL or lower revisions of the aforementioned versions will fail with "DOMAIN ERROR: Array is from a later version of APL".

We recommend that you read both the Release Notes and the dyalog_readme.

The Conga User Guide Supplement has now been merged into the main Guide; it is no longer included in 17.1 releases. The new Guide includes details of the changes to the Conga workspace. In particular you should use HttpCommand rather than the now-removed Samples.HTTPGet.
For example:
      )xload conga
      ]load HttpCommand
      html←(HttpCommand.Get'https://www.dyalog.com').Data

The online help can be found at https://help.dyalog.com/17.1; the PDFs etc can be found at https://docs.dyalog.com/17.1. The online files are updated more frequently than we update the installation images.