[DotGNU]Portable.NET 0.3.0 and pnetlib 0.1.4 released

[Rhys Weatherley]

Portable.NET 0.3.0 and pnetlib 0.1.4 have been released:

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.3.0.tar.gz
Library:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.1.4.tar.gz

The major changes in this release are to the C# compiler, which is
getting more useful by the day as a real compiler for GNU/Linux.

Many thanks to Gopal V for all his help tracking down bugs in the
compiler,
engine, and linker.  Also thanks to Charlie Carnow, Stephen Compall, and

Abhaya Agarwal for their contributions to pnetlib.

And thanks again to Gopal V for his work on pnetcgi, which I
demonstrated
at the linux.conf.au conference last week, together with "Hello World"
(gotta have it :-) ) and "Curse of Frogger".  The talk went over well.

Other changes are detailed in the appended NEWS entries.

Cheers,

Rhys.

Portable.NET 0.3.0 (11 February 2002)

Runtime engine:

* Implement native methods for "Platform.TaskMethods" and
  "Platform.DirMethods".
* Bug fixes for the CVM "switch" instruction.
* Bugs in "ldarg" and "ldloc" when "byref" types were present.
* Fix the implementation of "String.Replace".
* Bug in the CVM "return_n" instruction which caused it to
  return the wrong stack words.

C# Compiler:

* Lexer fixes for identifiers, verbatim string literals, hexadecimal
  characters, octal characters.
* Add the "volatile" field modifier.
* Validate the type of initialization expressions against constants.
* Fixes to the representation of constant blobs.
* Store decimal constants as "DecimalConstantAttribute".
* Update the pre-processor's condition syntax to match the latest
  C# language specification.
* Various fixes to the pre-processor directives.
* Expand constant fields inline.
* Compilation of properties, fields, casts, increment, decrement,
  "as", "is", "new", "typeof", "switch".
* Parser fixes for events, modifiers.
* Duplicate testing for fields, enumerated constants, and properties.
* Improve the coercion and cast API's to allow for subsetting.
* Implement more implicit and explicit conversions.
* Convert between Java and C# string objects where required.
* Default constructors.
* Use the values of literal constant fields during type gathering.
* Array access operators.
* Filter method groups to remove methods in base classes with
  identical signatures.
* Indexers.
* Fixes to interface declarations.
* Synchronous delegates.
* Bug fixes to string equality and inequality handling.
* Optimise checks of strings against "null" to use reference testing
  instead of operator calls.
* Report errors when instance members are accessed from static members.

Documentation:

* Add the top-level HACKING file to the tree.

Assembler:

* Add the "nullref" field initializer.

Linker:

* Fix forward references to methods and fields.
* Make sure that the converted type is used in method and field
  comparisons, not the original type.

Loader and Metadata:

* Ignore PE/COFF sections that are zero bytes in size when
  calculating minimum and maximum addresses ranges.
* Make the "il_types.h" API more opaque, and implement several new
  helper functions that are useful for the compiler.

Other:

* New helper functions for UTF-8 and UTF-16 string processing.
* More portability fixes for Solaris 8.
* Change all tools to output help message to stdout instead of
  stderr, to be consistent with the GNU Coding Standards.
* Alter the Fibonacci example, and add the "getenv" example.
* Implement the missing "ILDecimalFromDouble" function.

pnetlib 0.1.4 (11 February 2001)

* Add the "make_patch.sh" script to help with patch management.
* "System.IO.Path", "System.IO.File", and "Platform.DirMethods"
  submissions from Charlie Carnow <address@hidden>.
* Fix the definition of "TextWriter.Write(char)", which is not supposed
  to be implemented in the base class.
* "System.IO.StringWriter" submissions from Stephen Compall
  <address@hidden>.
* Temporarily disable decimal digit handling in "NumberFormatter",
  so that integers don't get displayed as "N.00".
* Bug fixes to "String.IndexOf" and "String.LastIndexOf".
* Adjust the invariant number formatting information to match ECMA.
* "DateTime.Compare" from Abhaya Agarwal <address@hidden>.
* Number formatting fixes for negative integers.