Ada-ASSURED 3.3 Release Notes

Introduction

GrammaTech, Inc. is pleased to announce the new release of Ada-ASSURED 3.3. This is the first release with native support for Microsoft® Windows NT®. Official Windows 2000® support is forthcoming. This release contains a number of improvements over Ada-ASSURED 3.2, which fall into the following categories:

NT native support

This new release is fully NT native; i.e., there is no requirement to install UNIX® shells such as MKS or GNU Bash. The previous release was ported to NT using the NuTCracker® porting tool, entailing installation of MKS, several GNU Bash commands (such as awk and sed), and an X Windows simulator.

The key bindings and some command names have been made Windows-compatible.

MDI interface

The standard Windows Multiple Document Interface (MDI) is provided. Automatic cascading and tiling of windows is supported.

Integration with standard browsers

Release 3.3 integrates with Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator. The previous release relied on the Spyglass Mosaic browser.

Quick and easy installation

Installation requires simply running the setup wizard (setup.exe) on the distribution CD and then installing the license file that you were provided. This process should take no more than 10 minutes.

Scheme resource variables

Release 3.3 uses Scheme variables to set the user options, where the previous NT release used the X resource mechanism to encode the user's customizations. Almost every X resource has been renamed to a scheme variable that starts with ``sg:'', after which a hyphen is inserted in front of each capital letter, which is then put into lower case. For example, X resource absoluteRightMargin has been replaced by Scheme variable sg:absolute-right-margin.

Where aahome is the installed location of Ada-ASSURED, the options file

aahome\Users\ user_name\aa-options.stk

can be edited by the user to customize the resources. The user's file is initialized by Ada-ASSURED from the installed file

aahome\files\aa-default-options.stk

Another new feature is that setting these resource variables is persistent; the commands print-setup and set-parameters update the user's options file at runtime.

Speed improvements

Release 3.3 is much faster than previous releases. This is due partly to optimizations in the internal encoding of the pretty printed text, and partly to improved incrementalization of the windows display module.

Print previewing

Print Preview is supported. This is standard for Windows applications and is useful for seeing the page layout before sending a document to the printer.

Bug Fixes

Ada-ASSURED 3.3 contains many fixes and improvements. This section lists some problems that were fixed in going to a native NT version.

The annoying flashing in Ada-ASSURED windows when the user clicked in a hot spot (e.g., [v7]) is gone.
The problem of an Ada-ASSURED window becoming all one color (blue, green, or yellow) has been corrected. This occurred when the HTML browser was open and the user opened the buffer list and then deleted the buffer list.
The flickering in the HTML browser when a user clicked on any pulldown menu in Ada-ASSURED has been fixed.
The keybinding Control+Delete for command kill-word is now effective.
The aa-client now correctly accepts the ``+ lineno'' syntax.
Extra blank lines are no longer inserted by the prettyprinter.
External line numbers were sometimes substantially wrong. This has been corrected.
Several instabilities have been fixed.