Upcoming 0.2 release

[Brian T Rice]

Hi all,

It's been too long since I've kept everyone up to date on things, mostly
because I have too many pressing worries lately <subliminal>leads on
employment would be helpful</subliminal>. But I'm determined to get a good
next release out. So here are the details:

0.2 will be the last lisp-based release major point release. So any
further updates and bugfixes will be applied to the current tarball. I'm
also going to abandon the binary packaged form and just rely on the
relative ease of installing CLISP while improving the packaging there; the
build.lisp script outputs a memory image, and so that's nearly as easy to
load.

There are a LOT of changes between 0.1 and 0.2. I've decided to drop the
work on full exception-handling and concurrency support in favor of
getting the Flow stream refactoring out the door, as well as the optional
keyword arguments and new subjective dispatch mechanisms available for the
would-be Slate user. I haven't covered the subjective dispatch yet;
there's a lot in the IRC logs, but it's mostly debate and change and not
coherent. I'll distill it down to a section in the manual and write up
some ideas and description here, on the mailing list. The C-translator
will not really be completely working, but demonstrable.

For a longer summary, see the NEWS file:
http://slate.tunes.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/slate/NEWS?rev=1.6&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

And of course a lot of progressive but really small enhancements have been
everywhere.

The exception-handling and concurrency weren't actually dropped, of
course, but working to layer Common Lisp extensively in this area was a
lot more difficult than I can manage, when I have a separate design in
mind for the VM setup. So the VM arrangement and everything that goes with
that are getting top priority after 0.2; generally Slate as a language
will be in a maintenance mode, with no new major changes (I hope).

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/