Release v6.4.375 · lmorg/murex

This change brings a number of ergonomic improvements to job control, datetime and working with structures.

Deprecation Warnings

Please read out compatibility commitment to understand how features are deprecated.

the ? pipe will be deprecated to make way for a the ternary operator. You can achieve the same result with <err> <!out>, eg command <err> <!out> parameters... | next-command ...
the = and let builtins are now officially deprecated. They've been marked as deprecated in the documentation for a couple of years but you'll now receive a deprecation warning when using them. This warning will not impact any functions that call them (they bypass the stdout and stderr pipes and write directly to your TTY) but it is still recommended that you update any existing code not to use it. The change is very simple, Murex supported expressions as first class primitives, so you can simply drop the = and let command names from your expressions
tread has been deprecated for a while due to read supporting all tread's use cases. tread will officially be removed in the next release
@[] syntax for ranging has been deprecated for a while. It will be officially removed in the next release in favour of []
backtick strings (````) has been an undocumented hack for several years. This release officially sees that hack as deprecated and will be removed in the next release
die has been deprecated because it just adds a feature for no purpose. It was original borrowed from Perl but realistically you can do the same with exit 1 so this removal is to bring the language complexity down.

None

IO redirection: smarter file pipes which solve the race condition seen in traditional shells where you try to write to the same file you're reading from (EXPERIMENTAL) (issue #851)
private functions: these can now be undefined (issue #429)
core: (expressions) are supported in dot notation. eg:
```
» bob = %[foo bar baz]
» out $bob.(1+1)
baz
```
elements: negative values are supported for counting backwards. eg:
```
» bob = %[foo bar baz]
» out $(bob.-1)
baz
```
core: support added for Bash-like job IDs (%n) in job control (issue #889)
bg / fg: support for command line parameters, as well as Bash-like job IDs (issue #889)
function: support for optional parameters when using named parameters (issue #888)
autocomplete: improved autocompletion for kill (issue #867)
datetime: numerous ergonomic improvements (read more, commit)
readline: MaxTabCompleterRows is now more granular (commit)
mxtty: updated csv support (commit, read more)

private functions: mutex added to mitigate a potential race condition (issue #883)
core: line numbering bugfix (commit)
readline: when in Vim mode, a and A should move the cursor right (commit)
index: support for null values (commit)
core: improvements with how raw command line parameters are passed to internal routines, which fixes a number of reporting bugs in process management tools

Thank yous for this release goes to tiymat, atagen for your testing and feedback.

Also thank you to everyone in the discussions group and all who raise bug reports.

You rock!