
                   NEW FEATURES in version 0.9.7.

This is bugfix release, in fact I'm (KLM) surprised how many bugs
creeped in during the transition from 0.9.5 to 0.9.6. Please upgrade
0.9.6 as soon as possible.

*   BUGFIX: removed automatic conversion of java.lang.Object to 
    java.lang.String, this caused invocation ambiguities if two
    overloaded methods one accepting Object and the other accepting
    String existed in the library (e.g. String.compareTo(...)). This
    problem was reported by Jitu Telang

*   BUGFIX: the typecasts were not recognized properly in the parser,
    this caused expressions like "(x)", "-(int)123" to be rejected
    as having a syntax error. This problem was reported by Aljoscha Klose.

*   BUGFIX: explicit conversion of comparizon result to boolean had failed,
    "(boolean)(2>1)". Reported by Aljoscha Klose.
    
*   BUGFIX: The conversion of StringBuffer to String on function calls
    was skipped resulting in VerifyErrors on the expressions like
    "methodAcceptingString("a"+virtualMethodReturningString())".

*   PERFORMANCE: the speed of the compilation was substantially improved
    by rewriting the Dynamic Variable (DV) handling in the parser to avoid
    unnecessary StringBuffer allocations. It is even more improved if
    DVs are not used (DVResolver is not supplied to the Library constructor).

*   PERFORMANCE: compiling method calls is now faster due to reduced
    memory allocations.

*   PERFORMANCE: The size of the parser was reduced by removing the syntactic
    level 4 lookahead when recognizing type casts, the JEL grammar now is
    completely LL(1).
    

                   BUGS

*   JEL does not run under IBM JDK 1.1.8 on Linux with JIT on if it was
    compiled by JDK 1.1 compiler with -O flag. This is either problem of
    javac or IBM's JIT. Note that distributed version is compiled with
    jdk 1.2 compiler and works with IBM JDK 1.1.8 JIT.

*   In Microsoft JVM with JIT enabled "d2i" instruction was not implemented
    correctly. To see if this BUG is fixed in Your JVM run the JEL
    testsuite, if all tests pass You are safe.
    

                       PLANNED FEATURES

1. More examples to come.

Tue Feb 20 17:02:33 CET 2001 
           Konstantin Metlov.