ANNOUNCE: CoATL version 0.1

[Frederic Bonnet]

ANNOUNCE: CoATL version 0.1
===============================
As part of my ongoing work on the Cloverfield project, I am pleased to
announce
the first version of CoATL, the Colibri Advanced Type Library.


WHAT IS CLOVERFIELD?
====================

Wiki page: http://wiki.tcl.tk/Cloverfield


WHAT IS COLIBRI?
================

Wiki page: http://wiki.tcl.tk/Colibri (outdated)
SF.net project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl9/files/colibri/

" Colibri is an abstract data type infrastructure. It features:

- Extensible data type sytem dubbed "words"

- Fast and efficient cell-based allocator

- Automatic memory management thanks to an exact (AKA accurate or
precise),
generational, copying, mark-and-sweep, garbage collector "


WHAT IS COATL?
==============

CoATL stands for "Colibri Advanced Type Library". It is based on the Colibri
library (currently at version 0.14) and adds advanced features not
supported by
the latter because of their reliance on external dependencies. As
Colibri is
meant to be lightweight and dependence-free, the goal of CoATL is to
host all
features relying on third-party code, heavyweight or external data, or
having
specific license issues.

At present, CoATL provides the following features:

- Full support for the Unicode Character Database (UCD) in its latest
version
(currently 6.1): all properties but character names and aliases are
statically compiled into the library in an efficient manner (the final
library file is around 800kB). This provides features such as case
mapping
and folding of individual characters and strings, and UCD property
accessors
on the full range of Unicode codepoints (over one million values).

- Regular expressions thanks to Henry Spencer's regexp package. This
was ported
from the Tcl 8.5 codebase and adapted to use Colibri ropes instead
of plain
flat character arrays. This provides transparent support for
fixed-width
8/16/32-bit and variable-width UTF-8/16 Unicode strings.


PLANNED FEATURES FOR NEXT VERSIONS
==================================

1. Arbitrary precision integer arithmetics thanks to LibTomMath library
(included in Tcl 8.5).

2. Improved Unicode utilities.


WHERE CAN IT BE FOUND?
======================

The CoATL source is part of the Colibri source distribution here:


http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl9/files/colibri/colibri0.14/colibri0.14.src.zip/download

A pre-compiled Windows library is available here, it includes the
command-line
executable along with Colibri DLL and the original Picol scripts:


http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl9/files/colibri/colibri0.14/coatl0.1.win32.zip/download


LICENSE
=======

The license is the same as for Tcl.

[Frederic Bonnet]

Erratum:

WHERE CAN IT BE FOUND?
======================

The CoATL source is part of the Colibri source distribution here:


http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl9/files/colibri/colibri0.14/colibri0.14.src.zip/download

Documentation and a pre-compiled Windows library are available here:


http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl9/files/colibri/colibri0.14/coatl0.14.doc.zip/download

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl9/files/colibri/colibri0.14/coatl0.1.win32.zip/download