beta-8

[Keith Hopper]

Greetings,
     I have put beta-8 on our sather web site
(http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/sather) for anyone who wishes to use it.  All
works well under linux, but there are a couple of things which are odd -
not about the code- under Windows2000:-

     (1)  I can't seem to get the command ./configure cygwin to work.  The
     shell doesn't seem to like the configure script - so I have just had
     to manually enter the last (copy) line by hand replacing the arg by
     'cygwin'.

     (2)  The makefile in the test directory will not compile programs - I
     -think- this is something to do with there being an undefined define
     for WIN32 - only applicable under Windows, of course.  If Nobbi (who
     wrote it) would like to try to fix it before moving onto the Gnu site
     I would be very grateful - TIA.

     The release page gives notes on changes - primarily

     a.   Fixes to input routines of the Represent sub-section.

     b.   Additional draft documentation - and fixes - in particular for
     the Code sub-section.

     c.   Unicode class is now fully conformant with version 3.0 of the
     standard.

     d.   salccomp is ready for testing (here).

     Unless there are major bugs which need fixing I don't aim to send out
another version until I can get the concurrency stuff working properly -
although it has hardly changed from the 1.2 implementation there seems to
be weird problems with linux lwps and smp_at in general.  Help warmly
appreciated!!

                Hasta la vista,

                        Keith

PS Just a couple of quick thoughts about some of the recent discussion -

     a.   The Sather language does NOT define a string as being
     'null-terminated' - this is purely an implementation matter which
     the astute programmer will need to forget all about - until external
     interfacing is needed.

     b.   The C programming language standard defines (void *) as being
     equivalent to any other pointer - hence the REFERENCE class
     implementation handles this - but does permit bit-pattern 'conversion'
     to a numeric value if needed for interfacing with external services.

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Waikato University
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