First of all, a ton of thanks to Bob Schumaker for doing the first draft port of E to Linux, and getting it building there. This release is his work + some integration & details.
Thanks also to Henry Boreen for making available to the E project a PC on which I was able to install Linux and complete the work.
Everyone with Linux boxes, it would be great if you could try building and/or installing 0.8.9. If there are any serious problems, I'd really like to know about them before FC'00.
The Linux installation page is
http://www.erights.org/download/0-8-9/unix-bin.html .
The (very terse for now) Linux building page is
http://www.erights.org/download/0-8-9/unix-src.html .
And everyone with Windows boxes, if you haven't yet tried installing 0.8.8 on Windows, please try installing 0.8.9 instead. The Windows install page is http://www.erights.org/download/0-8-9/unix-src.html . No one need bother trying to build on Windows.
Bare URIs are gone
The old URI syntax without the angle brackets is no longer accepted. 0.8.9 requires surrounding angle brackets, and is thereby able to lift the prohibition on commas and unbalanced parentheses.
Use vs Mention
As Ping once requested, strings are now shown as quoted string values in various appropriate contexts:
? ["a", 3]
now responds with
# value: ["a", 3]
rather than the old
# value: [a, 3]
<file:~/..> is now fine
The "file:" URI prefix (technically, protocol handler) now accepts paths containing "..". Previously, I prevented this as an artifact of how I addressed a security concern (preventing someone with a File object from obtaining from it File objects that are not descendents). The evil action is still prevented, but not by restricting the abilities of "file:".
"file:" now also does Unix-like bare tilde expansion. A bare tilde (as in "~/foo", as opposed to "~joe/foo") expands according to the setting of java.lang.System.getProperty("user.home"). On Unix systems, this is the same as Unix's "~". On Windows, this varies wildly depending on the version of Java. It is best to avoid this functionality on Windows until Java's behavior stabilizes. But E wasn't usable as a command language on Unix/Linux without this.
Please Test This
Once again, I'm hoping this is the last release till after FC'00. I hope to generate a lot of interest there, which may translate into downloads. Should someone download and can't make it work, it'll be hard to get their attention again. If there are bad problems, please let me know about them. If there aren't, please let me know that too! I'll sleep easier.
Now, to begin preparing my talk....
Cheers,
--MarkM