changes in sbcl-0.8.20 (0.9alpha.0?) relative to sbcl-0.8.19:

  * fixed inspection of specialized arrays. (thanks to Simon Alexander)
  * fixed disassembly of SHLD and SHRD on x86.  (thanks to David
    Lichteblau)
  * fixed loading of multiply forward-referenced layouts.
    (thanks to Cheuksan Wang)
  * fixed bug 7: less verbose COMPILE-FILE output. Additionally, the
    output is now directed to *STANDARD-OUTPUT* as specified by ANSI.
    (see COMPILE-FILE documentation for details of :PRINT option)
  * fixed bugs 19 and 317: fixed-format floating point printing is
    more accurate.  This also fixes a bug reported by Adam Warner
    related to the ~@F format directive.
  * fixed bug 371: bignum print/read inconsistency. (thanks to Harald
    Hanche-Olsen)
  * fixed bug: SET-SYNTAX-FROM-CHAR correctly shallow-copies a
    dispatch table if the from-char is a dispatch macro character.
  * fixed bug: COUNT and EQUAL on bit vectors with lengths divisible
    by the wordsize no longer ignore the last word.  (reported by Lutz
    Euler)
  * fixed bug in type checking of dynamic-extent variables. (reported
    by Svein Ove Aas)
  * optimization: sequence traversal functions use their freedom to
    coerce function designators to functions.
  * optimization: code with many calls to CLOS methods specialized on
    CLOS classes has had redundant type checks removed.
  * optimization: added declarations to speed up operations that access
    the internal character database (for example STRING-UPCASE)
  * optimization: comparison operations between floats and sufficiently small
    fixnums no longer create extra rationals
  * fixed some bugs related to Unicode integration:
    ** portions of multibyte characters at the end of buffers for
       character-based file input are correctly transferred to the
       start of the buffer at the next read.
    ** COMPILE-FILE now respects any EXTERNAL-FORMAT argument given,
       passing it through to OPEN.
    ** LOAD on source files likewise passes any EXTERNAL-FORMAT
       argument given to internal calls to OPEN.
    ** the built-in comment readers (introduced by character sequences
       ";" and "#|") are more forgiving to encoding errors; they will
       STYLE-WARN and then attempt to resync the stream at a character
       boundary.  (thanks to Teemu Kalvas)
  * fixed some bugs in the x86-64 port:
    ** Negative short int return values from c-calls are sign-extended
       correctly.
    ** The stack is aligned to 16-bytes for c-calls, as required by
       the ABI. (thanks to Cheuksan Wang)
    ** The disassembler understands more x86-64. (thanks to Cheuksan Wang)
    ** The regression tests use SB-ALIEN:INT instead of SB-ALIEN:INTEGER
       for enums. (thanks to Vincent Arkesteijn)
    ** Multiple small optimizations and bugfixes for floating point
       operations.
  * fixed some bugs revealed by Paul Dietz' test suite:
    ** Space, Tab, Linefeed, Return and Page have the invalid
       secondary constituent character trait.
    ** SET-SYNTAX-FROM-CHAR correctly copies multiple-escape character
       syntax.
    ** WITH-INPUT-FROM-STRING should only update the index place on
       normal termination.
    ** Pretty-printing backquoted forms when *PRINT-CIRCLE* is true
       works more reliably.
    ** Bit-array operations (BIT-AND and similar) worked incorrectly
       with one-dimensional arrays with fill pointers.
    ** TYPE-OF failed on a complex with an integer realpart and a
       RATIO imagpart.
    ** compiler failure during type inference for the code of form
       (IF (EQL X (THE ...)) ...) (MISC.535).