SOMns 0.5.0 Release: More Newspeak

[Stefan Marr]

Hi:

We just marked the next release, version 0.5.0, as “stable”.

The main focus of this release is to improve compliance with the Newspeak
specification. Specifically, we added various language features to the parser
to be able to parse the Newspeak benchmarks and main repository with only minor
changes.

These changes are pushed to the master branch, but development continues on the dev branch.

An update to the VS Code extension is hopefully coming soon. And it is needed to support the changes in the syntax.

Best regards
Stefan

### Newspeak Compatibility Improvements

- Implement Newspeak setter send syntax and remove old assignment syntax [\#7](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/issues/7), [PR #170](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/170)

- Added support for Newspeak's full numeral syntax. This includes notation for
a radix and the exponent notation. Examples: 16rFFFF, 2r10.11, 3.7e3 [PR #172](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/172)

- Added support for object literals. Because of parsing issues, we currently
use the keyword `objL` to identify literals. Otherwise, they are mostly
compliant the Newspeak specification.
[#86](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/issues/86), [PR #112](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/112)

- Add support for message cascades [\#18](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/issues/18), [PR #176](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/176), [PR #178](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/178)

- Add Newspeak type annotation support and local variable initializer expressions [PR #175](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/175)

- Add array literals [PR #173](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/173)

- Change standard file extension to `.ns` [PR #181](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/181)

- Various improvements in [PR #178](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/178)
- Support single quotes in strings as escape sequence
- Support literal characters
- Parse simultaneous slot definitions, but don't handle them yet.
- Support methods named `class`

### Changes for Development Setup

- Added automatic formatting for Java code [PR #131](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/131)

- Added automatic formatting of TypeScript code [PR #167](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/167)

### General Maintenance

- Fix handling of multiple stepping threads in Truffle [PR #168](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/168)

- Ensure eager primitives get correct parent node set, and minor cleanup [PR #171](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/171)

- Avoid block splitting when not necessary [PR #177](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/177)

- Model promise BPs solely with onResolver and onResolution [PR #169](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/169)

- Fix turn stepping operations, and introduce better actor testing framework [PR #179](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/179)

- Update Truffle to latest version \(\>0.26\) [PR #163](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/163)

- Add missing `@TruffleBoundaries` for SubstrateVM [PR #165](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/165)

- Simplify Object Model and add StorageAccessor [PR #164](https://github.com/smarr/SOMns/pull/164)


--
Stefan Marr
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
http://stefan-marr.de/research/