News Blog Added#

This is the first official entry in the Orc news blog. The goal of this blog is to provide a record of activity on the project, such as releases and important bugfixes. Just so the blog doesn't look embarassingly empty, I have posted some old release notes, back-dated.

Some recent documentation activity:

• There is now a community-maintained FAQ. Hopefully this will grow as we get more users asking questions.
• The User Guide now includes a fairly comprehensive chapter on implementing sites to be used by Orc programs.

I'd also like to report a few enhancements to the development version of Orc (available via CVS):

• The standalone compiler has a new option -oil which allows you to generate an XML representation of a desugared AST, called OIL (Orc Intermediate Language). This should be helpful for external analysis tools and alternate implementations of the engine, so they don't have to implement their own parser and compiler frontend. You can learn about the structure of OIL from the Javadoc. To generate a copy of the schema, run the class orc.ast.oil.Oil (bundled with the compiler JAR).
• For people interested in developing their own compiler backends who don't want to parse OIL XML, there is a demonstration of how to invoke the compiler frontend and translate OIL to an arbitrary intermediate representation: https://orc.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/orc/OrcJava/src/orc/BackendDemo.java?view=markup