Thursday, December 23, 2004

Python for Symbian Series 60 phones has been released. Not quite Common Lisp or Scheme but close enough for now. 10:39:38 AM

Version 1.0 of the Alice Programming Language has been released. From the announcement, highlights of the release are: SEAM Virtual Machine      A newly designed VM with support for just-in-time compilation      improves execution speed by a factor of up to 5 compared to      previous versions. Mozart is no longer required to run Alice.   GECODE Constraint Library      Constraints are now based on Gecode, an up-coming, cutting-edge      constraint library that is more than 10 times faster than the      previous implementation and features a significant number of      new, state-of-the-art constraints.   Graphical Tools      Inspector and Explorer have been reimplemented, providing      more functionality and better looks.   Component Model Overhaul      The component system has been cleaned up and is now more      flexible. Components are fully dynamic.   Standard Library      Now contains all mandatory modules of the Standard ML Basis. Alice ML is a mostly conservative extension of Standard ML featuring:   Futures      selective laziness and light-weight concurrency with      implicit dataflow synchronisation   Higher-order modules      higher-order functors and abstract signatures   Packages      dynamically typed ML modules as first-class values   Pickling      type-safe, generic & platform-independent marshalling,      including code, types and full modules   Components      type-safe lazy dynamic linking across the Internet   Distribution      type-safe remote functions and network mobility   Constraints      constraint propagation and programmable search for      solving hard combinatorical problems   Virtual Machine      portable implementation with support for just-in-time      compilation   Interactive tools      graphical browsers for data structures and search spaces For an overview of the Alice language have a look at the short tour. 10:22:09 AM