PLNews: Programming Language News

Chris Burrows has announced that he has a prototype of a Pascal-to-Oberon translator written. He is interested in knowing if it would be of use to anyone before proceeding any further.

The Kent Retargettable Occam Compiler 1.4.0-pre1 has been released. It is an Occam 2.1 implementation.

This release includes fixes for compilation problems with old releases of GCC, tranx86 updates for NOCC, plus other changes.

The Honolulu Ruby Users Group has been announced. The initial meeting will take place on October 12, 2005. Anthony Eden will be presenting a talk entitled "Ruby and Rails Just Rock.

The first issue of Ruby Code & Style, an online magazine focusing on Ruby, is now available. It is described as a "a peer-reviewed, online journal for the Ruby community." The advisory board includes Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto, as well as other notable members of the Ruby community.

The articles in this issue include: Modular Architectures with Ruby, by Jack Herrington, Creating Printable Documents with Ruby, by Austin Ziegler, and Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small is Beautiful, by Ara Howard.

The results of the 11th Prolog Programming Contest, held during ICLP2005 and CP2005, are now available. The winning team at the conference consisted of Peter Szabo, Peter Szeredi and Mats Carlsson. Bernhard Pfahringer won the online version of the contest. The questions and test files are also available.

The September 25 to October 1, 2005 edition of The Weekly Squeak is now available. It is a weekly summary of developments in the Squeak community. Squeak is a portable Smalltalk-80 implementation.

This edition covers topics such as the next release of Croquet being based off of Squeak 3.8, the alpha Squeak 3.9a release, enhancements to the Complex class, Japanese localization of Squeak images, plus more.

It has been announced that the next meeting of the Omaha Smalltalk User's Group will be held on October 11, 2005.

Blaine Buxton will be discussing the Seaside continuation-based web framework.

Pugs 6.2.10 has been released. Pugs is a Perl 6 implementation written in Haskell.

This release includes improvements to the Perl 5 and JavaScript backends; support for the Cabal framework, exposing Pugs as a Haskell library; plus other changes and bugfixes.

Mysaifu JVM 0.1.5 has been released. It is a Java virtual machine for Pocket PC 2003 systems.

This release adds the javax.comm package, and also includes bugfixes.

AspectJ 5 milestone 4 has been released. AspectJ adds aspect-oriented capabilities to Java.

This release includes the new reflection and weaver tools APIs, plus other enhancements and bugfixes.

Optimizing Oberon-2 Compiler 2.1.9 has been released. OOC is an Oberon-2 development system.

This release includes a new Lookup() method for Dictionary, emitted code that compiles cleanly with GCC 4.x, plus bugfixes and other changes.

SmartEiffel 2.2 beta3 has been released. SmartEiffel is a portable, open-source Eiffel implementation.

It has been announced that the Swiss Smalltalk User Group will be holding a Smalltalk gathering on November 18, 2005.

It has been announced that the next meeting of the Silicon Valley-San Francisco Bay Area Python Users Group will be on October 13, 2005. Tim Thompson will be discussing and demonstrating the Python-based Radio Free Quasar and Ergo applications.

py2exe 0.6.3 has been released. It converts Python scripts into Windows executables.

This is the first release from the new maintainer, Jimmy Retzlaff. It includes a dll-excludes command line option, an a fix for a crash while copying extension modules in packages.

Io 2005 10 07 has been released. Io is an embeddable, prototype-based language drawing from Smalltalk, Self, NewtonScript, Act1, Lisp and Lua.

This release features a reorganization of the source tree, stability fixes, plus other changes and bugfixes.

It has been announced that there will be a meeting on October 20 and 21 before EuroForth 2005 to discuss Forth standardization.

It has been announced that Scheme Request for Implementation 77: "Preliminary Proposal for R6RS Arithmetic", by William D. Clinger and Michael Sperber, is now available for discussion.

R 2.2.0 has been released. It is a open-source "language and environment for statistical computing and graphics," similar to the S language and environment from Bell Labs.

This release includes support for complex arithmetic done via C99 complex types, a new Chinese translation, an improved Russian translation, plus many other changes, improvements and bugfixes.

Axiomatic Multi-Platform C 1.2.8 has been released. It is a C compiler which emits Java bytecode.

This release includes improved support for 64-bit DOUBLE type operations.

The August/September 2005 ooRexx Status Report is now available. ooRexx is an open-source Object Rexx implementation.

The 64-bit rewrite of the code is in progress, with many improvements and a reduction in code size being reported. Planned are a new C++ interface for external function libraries, support for Classic Rexx external function libraries, a new EXTERNAL keyword added to the ::ROUTINE directive, plus more.

It has been announced that Jimmy Retzlaff will be taking over as the new py2exe maintainer. py2exe converts Python scripts to executable Windows programs.

OpenMCL 1.0 has been released. OpenMCL is an open-source Common Lisp implementation running on PowerPC Mac OS X/Darwin and LinuxPPC.

This release includes support for running in 64-bit mode on G5 systems running Mac OS X 10.4, garbage collection improvements, plus other improvements and bugfixes.

Ch 5.1 and Embedded Ch 5.1 have been released. Ch is a portable C and C++ interpreter, while Embedded Ch allows for the Ch interpreter to be embedded within other applications.

This release includes improved thread handling, over 100 new UNIX utilities for the Windows version of Ch, plus other improvements and many bugfixes.

A summary of Perl 6 developments between September 26 and October 2, 2005, is now available.

This summary covers topics such as debug and source segments in Parrot packfiles, magic numbers versus magic strings, look ahead/behind for loops, plus more.