kawa 1.6.92 released

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

A new kawa release is now available in the usual place:
        ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/kawa/kawa-1.6.92.tar.gz

I have also (finally!) updated the kawa web site.  (The javadoc
pages are still old.)

Noteworthy changes since 1.6.90:

    Kawa now installs as a .jar file (kawa.jar symlinked to
    kawa-VERSION.jar), rather than a collection of .class files.

    The Kawa manual includes instructions for how to build Kawa using GCJ,
    and how to compile Scheme code to a native executable using GCJ.

    Kawa now has builtin pretty-printer support, using an algorithm from
    Steel Bank Common Lisp converted from Lisp to Java.  The high-level
    Common Lisp pretty-printing features are mostly not yet implemented,
    but the low-level support is there.  The standard output and error
    ports default to pretty-printing.

    A new formatting framework uses the Consumer interface from gnu.lists.
    You can associate a format with an output port.  Common Lisp and JEmacs
    finally print using their respective syntaxes.

    All output ports (OutPort instances) are now automatically flushed on
    program exit, using a new WriterManager helper class.

    The new commmand-line option --debug-print-expr causes the Expression
    for each expression to be printed.  The option --debug-print-final-expr
    is similar, but prints Expressions after optimization and just before
    compilation.  They are printed using the new pretty-printer.

Note especially that there are now instructions for compiling Scheme
code to native code using Gcj.  I would encourage people to try this
out.  I'm hoping the instructions in the manual are clear enough!
Note that this does require a very recent version of gcc (i.e. yesterday!),
and you need to get gcc out of CVS, preferably the gcc-3.0 branch.
See http://gcc.gnu.org/cvs.html for instructions; to check out the
gcc-3.0 branch add -r gcc-3_0-branch to the cvs co command thus:
        cvs -z 9 co -r gcc-3_0-branch gcc

My plan is to aim for a Kawa 1.7 release fairly soon after Gcc-3.0 is
released (which should be very soon), and to try to publicise this
somewhat widely, so please let me know if there are serious problems,
especially any regressions.

One thing I do plan to implement before 1.7 is to make the commonlisp
support independent of JEmacs, and make it build using Gcj.

Something else we may need to fix is building Kawa under MS-Windows.
The old batch file has not been updated, and new directories and
pre-processed Java files have been added.  I'd like to hear from
people building Kawa on Windows, and make sure we have a documented
working method.  At the very least I would like people should be able
to build Kawa under Cygwin.  Or is good enough to provide a .jar file?
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/per/