0.3 enters alpha phase

[Brian Rice]

Hi all,

This is just a kind of sneak preview of the 0.3 release; I've uploaded 
the bootstrap generated files for little-endian systems to:

http://slate.tunes.org/downloads/alpha/

There's a vm.c and vm.h which are platform-independent, and a 
slate.image which is basically the kernel image with a REPL. We don't 
have endianness-swapping built into the vm yet, so a different image is 
needed for big-endian systems; use the slate.image.be.

Anyway, grab all the files and put them in some local directory, and 
issue "make vm" to build a vm named "slate", then run "./slate 
slate.image" to execute.

There's no file or socket support yet, and the image takes a while to 
get to the REPL point because it essentially has to initialize a lot of 
things that make it easier to generate the image in the first place.

If you want to generate your own image, you basically have to generate 
a VM first and then use the state built up from that process to build 
an image based on it. So it's:

Slate> Compiler generateVM: 'vmsourcename'.

(once the mobius, c, vm libraries are loaded), and then

Slate> Compiler buildImage: 'imageName' &littleEndian: (True/False).

The current tarball in the usual place is up-to-date to perform this. 
Anyway, give it a good beating, and report those bugs!

-Brian