[DotGNU]Portable.NET 0.4.8 released

[Rhys Weatherley]

New versions of pnet, pnetlib, and treecc have been released:
  
Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.4.8.tar.gz
Library:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.4.8.tar.gz
Treecc:   http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/treecc-0.1.8.tar.gz

The big news for this release is that pnetlib now builds cleanly
with pnet and works just fine with ilrun.  Hooray!  We are finally
free of dependency upon third party C# tools.

This is a big deal, as Portable.NET is now pure Free Software, and we
will begin publicising this fact around the various community news sites
over the next week or so.  Contact Gopal or myself if you want to help 
get the word out.

We now in a position that we can attack pnetlib with a vengenance.
Haul out the pnetlib status page (http://www.dotgnu.org/pnetlib-status),
pick a TODO, and off we go.

Thank you very much to everyone who has helped us get this far.
A very special thank you to Gopal, who has been hacking like crazy
on the system the last two weeks, as you'll see by the many mentions 
of his name in the NEWS entries below.  I hereby dub thee "FFOD II",
in recognition of your efforts Gopal.

Cheers,

Rhys.

Portable.NET 0.4.8 (23 November 2002)

Runtime engine:

* Better handling for uncaught exceptions to prevent misleading
  "virtual memory exhausted" indications.
* Resolve explicit assembly references in "Type.GetType".
* Allow any method to suppress finalization on an object (Gopal V).
* Fix internalcalls for String and StringBuilder (Jonathan Springer).
* Bug fix to verification of "stobj" (Gopal V).
* Registration of third-party internalcalls (Gopal V).
* Regular expression handling (Gopal V).
* Verification of tail calls on 64-bit systems (C H Gowri Kumar).
* "HostToNetworkOrder" problems with "gcc -O2".

C# Compiler:

* Coerce the correct node in array initializers (Robert Hwang).
* IndexerName attributes on properties (Gopal V).
* Make sure that the finally block of a "try" statement covers
  the catch clauses as well as the statement body.
* Raise an error when attempting to define a private virtual.
* Infer the correct machine type for value type "new" calls (Gopal V).
* Foreach statements without IEnumerable (Gopal V).
* Perform constant coercion before operator lookup (Gopal V).
* ECMA fixes for reducing method candidate sets.
* References to types without an explicit "using" (Jonathan Springer).
* Indexers that have "params" arguments (Gopal V).
* Warn when a non-extern constructor has no body (Gopal V).
* Fixes to value type casting (Gopal V).
* Parameter coercion for user-defined binary operators (Gopal V).
* Use "callvirt" for instance methods even if not virtual.
* Alias support for "using" declarations (Gopal V).
* Multi-step coercions for user-defined operators (Gopal V).
* Numeric type promotion for "bool" values (Gopal V).
* Process static constructors in textual order (Jonathan Springer).
* Access modifier fixes for nested types (Robert Hwang).
* Fix line numbers on replacement nodes (Gopal V).
* Improve errors when base class constructors cannot be resolved.
* Use "rem.un" for unsigned integer types.
* Strength reduction for multiply and divide operators (Gopal V).
* Use "ldlen" to get the length of single-dimensional arrays.
* Better error recovery for syntax errors in the C# grammar.
* Remove the obsolete "value" flag from structure types.
* Interface, modifier, and attribute fixes for ECMA compatibility.
* Add the "DefaultMember" attribute to classes that have indexers.

C Compiler:

* Fix the use of "&" on local arrays.

Documentation:
  
* Recognise the name forms of attribute targets in "csdocvalil".
* References to attributes in foreign assemblies in "csdocvalil".

Loader and Metadata:

* Convert pointer and byref types into synthetic classes.
* Recognise "Serializable", "NonSerialized", and "IndexerName"
  as special builtin attributes.

Platform Support:

* Portability fixes to time and directory handling.
* Determine the current culture from the "LANG" variable.
* Use "execvp" to spawn child processes instead of "execv".

Other:

* Emulate parts of the NUnit API in "csunit" to assist with the
  migration of NUnit test cases.
* Improve source file listing capabilities in "ildb".
* Type sizes and alignment in libffi for ia64 (C H Gowri Kumar).

pnetlib 0.4.8 (23 November 2002)

* Bring version numbers into sync with "pnet".
* Small bug in I18N.Common.ByteEncoding (Gonzalo Paniagua Javier).
* Implement "ToString" for reflection classes.
* Use the "InvokeMember" flag from "Activator.CreateInstance".
* Run regression tests from the in-tree built copy of pnetlib.
* Implement the rest of "System.Collections.Specialized".
* Missing non-ECMA attribute classes in "System.Reflection".
* Implement some of the easy "System.ComponentModel" classes.
* Missing byte count for "BinaryReader" and "BinaryWriter" (Gopal V).
* Implement "System.CodeDom" and "System.CodeDom.Compiler".
* "make install" now works (Gopal V).
* Bugs in "StringBuilder.Insert" (Jonathan Springer).
* Bug fixes to "StreamWriter" (Jeff Post and Adam Treat).
* More directory functions (Charlie Carnow).
* Test fixes (Jonathan Springer, Gopal V, Rhys Weatherley, etc)
* Globalization English fallbacks for ToUpper/ToLower (Gopal V).
* Fix enumerator logic for "System.Array" (Gopal V).
* Add I18N hooks for non-charset Globalization functionality.
* Fix "ArrayList.IndexRange" to match ECMA.
* Fixes to various "System.Net" classes (Gopal V).
* Bug fixes to "ArrayList".
* Fix makefile dependency checks so that csant-using components
  rebuild properly when source files change.
* Rename tests to make it clearer which test class failed.
* Move security-sensitive public internalcalls from runtime to System.
* ECMA compatibility fixes to reduce the number of validation errors.
* Private regular expression routines to support "Directory" (Gopal V).
* Test cases for cryptographic API's.
* Range check problem in "FileStream" constructor (Yannis BRES).
* Uri test case fixes (Gopal V).
* Make "mklist.sh" BSD-friendly.

treecc 0.1.8 (23 November 2002)

* Bug fixes and documentation for Ruby back-end (Peter Minten).
* Support languages that don't use tabs for indenting (Peter Minten).