New alpha image & VM up

[Brian T. Rice]

Oops, I forgot to mention that and: and or: are still provided, and 
probably will remain available for a while. I'm not about to void anyone 
else's code! :)

Brian T. Rice wrote:

> As always, they are available at: http://slate.tunes.org/downloads/alpha/
> 
> I've made some systematic changes to handle an overdue method refactoring.
> 
> The boolean methods and: and or: have been renamed to /\ and \/ 
> respectively, and all libraries in the core system and Mobius have been 
> refactored to use them. Essentially, these are overridings for methods 
> in the second argument.
> 
> The benefit of this is that AND/OR operations in Slate can be uniform 
> without requiring the added keyword bagged of and:/or: (mostly in terms 
> of parentheses and keyboard strokes). The downside is of course that 
> it's easier to read "and" and "or" in "and:" and "or:". In the future, 
> we may be able to elide the syntactic inconvenience of using relatively 
> unfamiliar symbols using code-editing and display frameworks (probably 
> in combination with Unicode symbols if we have an easy coding system for 
> it). This is kind of a weak promise, but & and | from Smalltalk are 
> inappropriate for Slate.
> 
> I have uploaded VM sources generated with the additional StringProto and 
> ByteArrayProto linking points that Attila added. They're not quite of 
> use yet, but this may change shortly and I wanted that to be available.
> 
> I've also added a utility in src/mobius/image.slate which allows for a 
> wrapper around saveImageNamed:. The method "_ at Image save &name:" uses an 
> Oddball named Image to store the image's filename as a default save 
> option, and as a wrapper can do some simple things like raise a 
> condition if there's an existing file that you may need to overwrite.
> 
> What's coming up for the next alpha image is probably the REPL usability 
> enhancements, which I am working on.
> 
> The major project for the core right now is concurrency support, which I 
> am still doing some final bits of research on and have some code I'm 
> working with. The obstacle in this is determining what naturally fits 
> into Slate's idiom, and what we want it to feel like afterward. I may 
> write more on this later, since whatever final choices are made, they 
> will certainly need explaining.

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