[DotGNU]DG-Base and C@ update

[Peter Minten]

Here's an update on DG-Base and address@hidden

--- DotGNU-Base ---

I'm currently working on integrating dotgnu.pm into DG-Base as a Regex class
(this is needed for C@ that relies on a Regex class in it's base lib). The whole
P/Invoke stuff of dotgnu.pm is put in DotGNU/support. The support dir Makefile
is referenced from configure.in and DotGNU/Makefile.am, support dir makefiles
must be referenced from these two files, this avoids having Makefiles in
directories that don't really need them, this is also the procedure other
projects should follow.

Regex will probably be in CVS next Saturday.

--- C@ ---

Listening to Rhys warning about that C@ could turn into a kitchen sink language
I've decided to put down design for now and to start implementing some simple
features. The features I've chosen are:
* The preference option for namespaces, this is of form 'prefer namespacename;',
only one preference option can be active in a file and the range is one file
only.
* The '!object' = 'object == null' code.

The next features to be implemented are probably:
* Anonymous classes (using a class block without naming it, the compiler then
gives it a name that doesn't conflict with other class names)
* Adding the =~ and !~ operators for regular expression matching and making them
link automatically to the Regex class. Performance may be a bit lower than if
I'd implement the regex code internally and then intercall, but this is
certainly a lot easier (and regexes aren't very performance critical anyway).

Aspect stuff is placed a lot further down the line, I hope to have it in before
next summer :-). The problem here is that the stuff needs to be designed well
before I implement it because it's a little tough work. The design is slowly
getting forward but it will take some months before I can come up with a decent
language spec.

Note that the work on C@ is happening outside pnet CVS so that my errors won't
break the build. When there are enough stable features implemented I'll ask Rhys
for permission to put a stable version of my work in CVS.

Greetings,

Peter