
                   NEW FEATURES in version 0.9.11.

This release is a minor compatibility and status fix. The last one (done
more than a year ago) proved itself to be very stable with no critical
bugs reported (despite thousands of downloads from main site only). This
release should inform you that the absence of releases is not due to the
death of the project, but because the code is really stable.

1. JDK 1.4 source compatibility.

  The changes in this release extend the source compatibility up to the 
  JDK 1.4. The resulting library is compiled by 1.4.0 javac with default code
  generation options.

2. Detailed identification of the result type prior to expression evaluation. 

  New method "public Class getTypeC()" was added to gnu.jel.CompiledExpression, 
  which allows to query the compiled expression about its result type prior to
  evaluation. This identification is based on compile-time type analysis. For
  more details see JavaDoc comment for the method.

  The testsuite is expanded accordingly and now each test in it also tests
  this newly added method.

3. Numerous doc commentsfixes.

The compatibility was tested anew against JDKs 1.3 & 1.4 (from Sun, IBM 
& Blackdown) with no tests failing, and against Transvirtual's Kaffe VM 
1.0.7-rc1 (JDK 1.1 compatible), with 7 tests failing, all related to the known
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=158743&msg=1)
Math.round bug in Kaffe VM.

                       PLANNED FEATURES

1. Improve detalization of error messages. A few (2-3) error messages become
   unused with a new parser. Also, having a custom parser gives more control
   in adding more helpful and suggestive error messages. This is an important
   problem and I would like to consider it separately. It will be implemented
   in a next non-bugfix release. Anyway, the current error messages are not
   that bad, just they can be better. UPDATE: implementation of this was
   currently postponed, because the present level of detalization seems to be
   quite sufficient (at least there were no feature requests of this kind).
   

Wed Oct 15 16:08:33 CEST 2003 
           Konstantin Metlov.
