[Eclipse-clp-announce] Release 6.0

[Joachim S. (I. Contractor) <jsc...@ci...>]

After a long time in the making, release 6.0 of ECLiPSe is now
officially ready for download in source and binary forms, from
both the Sourceforge download page:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=177708

and also from the ECLiPSe-CLP home page:

http://www.eclipse-clp.org/download.html

Note that the ECLiPSe-CLP website always has the latest successful
build of ECLiPSe, but usually fewer binary distributions.

The major change in this version is the replacement of the old ECLiPSe
compiler by a new one written entirely in ECLiPSe itself.  This has
enabled us to address a few long-standing problems with the old
compiler, to implement several performance improvements to the runtime
system, and to provide new debugging features like source-linked
tracing and setting of breakpoints.  We also hope that this change
makes it possible for researchers to experiment with ECLiPSe more
extensively.

There have been extensive changes internally associated with the new
compiler, but we have tried to minimise the incompatibilities and
changes that will affect the general user.  We have also tested the
system extensively, but with such a fundamental change, it is possible
that something was missed.  Please try out your existing applications
with the new compiler, and let us know of any problems, feedback or
comments.

As usual, there are various further enhancements to kernel, built-ins
and existing libraries, as well as several new user-contributed
libraries.  See the release notes
http://eclipse-clp.wiki.sourceforge.net/ECLiPSe+6.0+Release+Notes
for more details of these changes.

ECLiPSe is a Constraint Logic Programming platform, with a programming
language that is an extension of standard Prolog, and includes a host
of libraries to support constraint solving and program development.
It has been in development for many years, and was open-sourced in
September 2006 under a Mozilla-style Public Licence, allowing
unrestricted use (http://www.eclipse-clp.org/licence/).  Development is
being sponsored by Cisco Systems, the owner of the original code base.

Kish Shen and Joachim Schimpf