[ANN] Idle 0.20 beta (RC1)

[Thomas Lauer <thomas.lauer@...>]

Once again sitting at my drab desk -- after a nice, long trek across
south-east Asian rice paddies and amazing temple landscapes (and night
markets) -- I am nevertheless happy to announce the first beta release
of Idle.

Actually, this is RC1. If no major hiccups surface, I will release the
beta in about a weeks' time.

Changes for this version are restricted to the runtime library (i.e. no
fiddling with the language). They include:

+ a set of console I/O functions, including scrolling the screen buffer
  and full raw keyboard input
+ functions to send keypresses to other applications and to manipulate
  windows
+ functions to support the Win32 file change notification API
+ a global variable printf which is by default initialised with
  util.printf(). This shorthand allows the easy redirection of all
  formatted output (e.g. by setting printf to win32.printf()).
+ the Idle runtime DLL is now called 'idle02.dll' with the two digits
  being the runtime version (currently 0.2). This version number (and
  hence the name) will only change if I have to introduce changes which
  are not backward compatible.
- a small, but not-backward-compatible change to util.unpack() concerns
  the unpacking of zero-terminated ASCII strings
- for reasons of consistency the functions os.spawn(), os.wait() and
  os.kill() have been renamed to os.spawnProcess( ), os.waitProcess()
  and os.killProcess()
- updated several core modules and libraries to current releases (among
  them Lua 5.1.3, LuaJIT 1.1.4 and PCRE 7.6)

I have also removed the time limits that were present in the earlier
alpha builds: the beta version (and all future versions) will run
without such restrictions.

This version is available for systems running Windows 2000 and later.
For details, documentation and downloads see http://idle.thomaslauer.com

-- 
cheers  thomasl

web: http://thomaslauer.com/start