Slate updates

[Brian T Rice]

It's been so quiet lately; I had forgotten this list existed to some
extent.

Anyway, there are some updates on the Slate project that I thought worth
sharing. The VM-and-image standalone setup are nearing completion; Slate
currently has been running inside of a Lisp image. We've worked out many
new interesting libraries and designs, particularly for the collections,
streams, external i/o, and graphics. We also still have our optimizing
to-native compiler being worked on as time allows, with many interesting
techniques.

The language has incorporated two major experimental updates:  first,
subjective programming is now supported by an extension to the method
dispatch system. This is detailed in the manual:

http://slate.tunes.org/progman/node8.html#SECTION00033500000000000000

although there are implications which are not entirely obvious from that.
We have that as well as optional keyword argument-passing implemented, but
not incorporated extensively, as we've been letting the design influence
our thinking as we work on everything else, trying to find the best way to
apply these mechanisms, or find out what problems may exist with the idea
as implemented.

I just released 0.2.1, which still requires Common Lisp to run, but also
includes quite a bit of the basis of the new implementation. A separate
standalone release should be just a month or two away.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/