[DotGNU]Portable.NET Status - 16 Nov 2002

[Rhys Weatherley]

It's been a while since the last status message, so here goes ...

Gopal and Jonathan Springer have been hard at work on the compiler.
Not a day goes by without them hacking something or other.  I'm
have trouble keeping up, but here are some highlights since 0.4.6
was released of their many travels:

  - Fixes to value type object creation.
  - "foreach" can now iterate over collections that implement
    GetEnumerator(), but not IEnumerable.
  - Constant coercion fixes for operators (the dreaded uint coerce
    bugs seem to be mostly squashed now).
  - Namespace "using" fixes for picking up namespaces that aren't
    on an explicit list, and for handling aliases.
  - Indexers that use "params" for their parameters.
  - Pass "null" correctly to "params" methods.
  - Naming weirdnesses for attributes.
  - Value type to object casts.
  - Coerce user-defined operator parameters correctly.

I've mostly been hacking on pnetlib, principally in the namespaces
System.Globalization, System.ComponentModel, and System.CodeDom.

Lots of other little fixes here and there.  Check the ChangeLog
for the full details.

I'm very happy with the progress on the compiler.  We are bounding
ever closer to the day we can ditch the MS C# compiler forever.

Now that the cscc compiler can compile the libraries more or less
cleanly under GNU/Linux (and every other pnet platform), there
are no excuses now ... grab a class or "grep TODO *.cs" in the
code and help out on pnetlib.  Or help out with the test suite.
Or documentation, or anything that takes your fancy.

Cheers,

Rhys.