There have been a variety of improvements to Frink, including one
rather important bug.

The most important bug occurred when when dividing some integer
expressions a/b where the numerator was a large integer (magnitude
greater than 2^31). Due to the way that Frink simplifies expressions,
this case did not happen often, but occurred when more complex
expressions involving uncommon operators or functions were encountered,
like 2^40 / 40!.

The error manifested itself by printing "NotAnIntegerException" and
halting the program. This bug did *not* cause silent errors, nor did it
ever produce incorrect answers; if you encountered it, the program
halted with this error message. Please update your version of Frink at
the usual location:

http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/

In addition, there have been a lot of little improvements and new
features:

* Added a new "multi-line" input mode to the AWT GUI. This allows
you to easily write multi-line functions, loops, or control flow
statements without being confined to the single-line input field. To
access this, select "Multi-Line" from the "Mode" menu or use the
accelerator key listed in that menu. This may undergo changes in the
handling of the up and down keys, which is currently non-optimal. Also
note that multi-line mode requires that you click the "Go" button to
execute the statement. Hitting the return key just moves the cursor to a
new line.

* Fixed an error message that may have incorrectly claimed "No
function match found for function name" when the error was actually an
undefined method call *somewhere in the body of that function*.

* Improved error messages when attempting to call methods on an
object that really isn't an object.

* Added various functions and methods for manipulating arrays, such
as array.pushFirst[x] and array.popFirst[] methods to allow pushing and
popping from the front of an array, and array.lexicographicPermute[] to
produce all the permutations of the elements in the array in
lexicographical order. This is in contrast to the array.permute[] method
which returns the permutations in no particular order (and does thus not
require them to be comparable.)

* Improved Frink-to-Java introspection and mapping of types between
Frink types and Java types.

* Improved many functions in the sun.frink astronomical library,
including adding functions to predict moon phases, and the position of
the moon's crescent. See:
http://futureboy.us/fsp/colorize.fsp?fileName=sun.frink

These were used to enhance the "Moon Locator" web page, to show
many more details about the moon, including the position of its
crescent, its distance from earth, and even its velocity towards earth.
(Right now, the moon is receding from earth at a velocity of 104 mph.)

* Added a new "guitools" library to Frink for easy building of
graphical user interfaces. This is still experimental and everything
about it may change, but there's a quick sample of building a GUI with
overloaded paint methods in the guitoolstest.frink file:

http://futureboy.us/fsp/colorize.fsp?fileName=guitoolstest.frink


I do not usually announce all minor releases to this list, but I do
announce them to the Freshmeat list:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/frinklang/

(Follow the "subscribe to new releases" link to get on this list.)

I will probably create a poll for this list to find out if most
people would rather have every minor release announced to this list as well.

As always, a detailed list of changes is available at:
http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/whatsnew.html

--
Alan Eliasen | "Furious activity is no substitute
eliasen@... | for understanding."
http://futureboy.us/ | --H.H. Williams