Change in project focus, and lots of actual code.

[Brian T Rice]

Hi all,
I'm sorry about the long silence here, but the language turned out to be
more trouble for me to work with as I had laid it out than I bargained
for.
However, a few months ago, Lee Salzman and I took his idea of implementing
multi-method dispatchin languages based on prototypes, and we implemented
a hybrid of Self and Smalltalk that used these properties to their maximum
extent. We ported lots of Smalltalk libraries, evolved some ideas from
Self, and cleaned up the features as much as possible. We were calling
this language "Who, Me?" for a while, as a sort of pun, but we eventually
realized that what we wanted to be done in Slate would be done in this
language with less brain-twisting procedures. I eventually want to move
into syntax independence and ultimately ways to provide algebraic
semantics, but something more immediately useful that will come first is a
new graphical interface, a new clean bootstrap with better ways to manage
the system than Lisp or Smalltalk currently offer, and a more portable
(and hopefully faster) dynamic compiler and optimizer set.

We were hoping to have the bootstrap and GUI done by now, but we're not
quite ready. At any rate, we have quite a bit of code in CVS management at
tunes.org:
http://slate.tunes.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/

The code is relatively well debugged, except for modules which obviously
don't have anything meaningful built up yet, especially the graphics
system.

There is an introduction within it designed for people familiar with
Smalltalk (under ./doc), which also explains how to start up the
interpreter and load in the sources. We need a new web site and a
documentation framework; if anyone has some suggestions or would like to
help, please let me know.

I will be attending both the International Lisp Conference in San
Francisco in late October as well as this year's OOPLSA, and I hope to
show this off there.

As a final note, Slate is now a joint product of the Tunes project and my
own business, Logos R&D, and it's released Freely. The license will be
decided on fairly soon. Consider it under BSD-style licensing for the time
being (caveat hackor!).

Enjoy, and thanks for your patience!
Brian Rice