Fine / News: Recent posts

At some point the CVS repository for the Fine project was trashed. I don't know what happened or when. To make matters worse I am not sure when the last backup copy I made was and I can't find it right now.

So I plan to attempt to repair it, but it could take some time. My appologies!

To test out creating RPMs. I have created a source RPM and binary RPM. They were created on SuSE 9.0 and I have built them on Mandrake and Fedora Core.

I have decided to give up on maintaining compatibility with Eiffel, at least for the time being. My original plan was to try to keep Fine so that it would compile Eiffel programs, Fine programs, or a mixture of the two. But I'm finding it difficult to accomplish all I want as it is and trying to maintain compatibility just makes it more difficult. I also find that I disagree more with some of the latest additions to Eiffel and I don't want them in Fine at all. For example, I don't like the "once" string thing at all. To me it makes the code look confusing. If anyone reading this has strong objections, please e-mail me (sedwards@xmission.com).... read more

I have moved the utility programs (file_dump, replace_string, restore_files, remove_duplicates, dos_to_unix, and unix_to_dos) and the audio example files to their own project areas. The utility programs are now the Simple Command Line Utilities (http://sourceforge.net/projects/clutil) project and the audio examples are now the Command Line Audio (http://sourceforge.net/projects/claudio) project.

Fine is currently based upon SmallEiffel version -0.76. I have begun merging in the next major release of SmallEiffel (-0.75 as the SmallEiffel version numbers count down). The current plan is to merge the library files first and then work on the compiler itself. The major features that will be obtained from this will be the ability to use 'ace' files and a new debugger.

Added default error handling (so that errors are handled even if the code does not explicity handle them). File write errors are now caught instead of ignored. Also completely reworked the binary file classes. They can also be reset to the beginning of the file. Added raw audio and wave file classes. A couple of new utility programs were also added.

Added support for Mac OS X. Also fixed some bugs in the install script and split it into different scripts for different platforms.

There was a bug in the GTK library that prevented programs that used it from compiling. This was because I inadvertantly checked in a version of gdk_constants.e which I had added underscores in some of the bit constants to make them easier to read. Version 0.9.1 has fixed this by allowing underscores in bit constants.

Release 0.9 is available. New features are binary files which allow 8,16,24,and 32 bit integers, unsigned, bit_n, boolean, and 32 bit floats to be written or read from a file, in either little endian or big endian modes. It is also working on Windows, with the Microsoft C compiler. Fixed the bug in the string class where the program wouldn't C compile if the mutable/immutable feature wasn't used (because `_key' was not a member of the structure). Also fixed some other minor bugs.

I have added a few command line audio processing tools that I wrote, in the `src/examples' directory under `audio'. They currently only work with raw audio files, but I plan to add the ability to work with wave files in the future.

This release has the eGTK library integrated into it. Included with the gtk examples is `Calculator IV', a little four function calculator. Also the `cleanup' and `brief' commands are fixed. And some problems were fixed with repeated inheritance.

This version has been tested and is working on BeOS. The `sys' directory and all of the `loadpath.<SYS>' files were eliminated and now there is a built in default library path compiled in. The load paths have been changed so that relative paths in a `loadpath.se' file are relative to that file. The STRING `to_external' file will now work even if the string is immutable. And the opening double quote for the STRING storage is now printed in the stack dump.

Released new version, with an UNSIGNED integer type, unsigned constants and hexadecimal constants. Also added `seconds_since_epoch' to the BASIC_TIME class and a random number generator to the general class.

Corrected defects in Release 0.4 which caused it to not compile correctly if assertions were enabled. Also made some minor changes to make the code easier to read and understand.

I have discovered that there is a problem in Release 0.4 and I am removing it from the available files. I will be putting up Release 0.5, which contains the correction, in a few hours.

New release with a `string_aliaser' class in the standard library.

I have set up the following catagories for `Bugs':

Installation - problems with install.
Reports Error on Valid Code - compiler reports errors in a valid source file.
Bad Code Generated - generated C code won't compile or produces incorrect results.
Crash or Fault - compiler crashes, core dumps, segmentation faults, or otherwise terminates abnormally.
Library - problems in one of the library classes.
Documentation - error in documentation (what documentation? :-)... read more

Three Fine e-mail lists have been set up (fine-announce, fine-devel, and fine-users).