[XPS-devel] XPS 0.1.8 Released

[Reid S. <re...@re...>]

Dear XPSers,

Tonight I've released version 0.1.8 of XPS.  This release includes
tested and working versions of much of the infrastructure needed for the
0.2.0 release. Many improvements to the memory system have been made
especially typesafe "pointers" in memory regions. The ADT module was
overhauled and provides Array and HashTable templates now. The META
module was revised to use the new HashTable and Array implementations as
well as the new VectorPointer classes. It was also augmented to provide
XPL output from a stored metaschema (partial implementation). This is
the first release to pass the"make distcheck" target and should be
simpler to build. This is a large step closer to getting to a reflective
compiler. That is, one that can reproduce the original input from its
symbol table. That is the goal for the 0.2.0 release. The next release,
0.1.9, will include a full meta schema for XPL which will be used as the
compiler's symbol table. Once that is done, the metaschema will be
attached to the xplc compiler so that the metaschema can be produced
directly from XPL and hence we arrive at release 0.2.0. The compiler
will then be able to correctly report on syntactic, grammatical, and
semantic errors. This approach ensures that we've captured all the
salient information about a program before moving forward with code
generation which is the subject of the 0.3.0 release.

Stay tuned, we'll have a compiler for XPL programs in a few months.

Best Regards,

Reid.