New Mint Release: r15700

On Friday, I created a new release of Mint and DrJava with Mint: August 20, 2010 (r15700). The latest release is, as always, available from the Mint implementation page:

The only changes that we made were a small change to the build process on Mac OS, and the addition of the Range and Lift utility classes.

The Lift class allows the user to manually lift primitive values and strings when the compiler did not do that already, for example when working with arrays.

The Range class provides methods that allow many for loops to be written as foreach loops with a final loop variable that can be used across bracket boundaries immediately. Consider this example of a staged sparse matrix multiplication:

public static separable Code smmult(final double[][] a, Code b, Code output, int l, int m, int n) { Code stats = <| { } |>; for(final int i: range(0, l)) { for(final int j: range(0, m)) { Code c = <| 0.0 |>; for(final int k: range(0, n)) { if(a[i][k] == 0.0) continue; else if(a[i][k] == 1.0) c = <| `c + (`b)[k][j] |>; else c = <| `c + (`(lift(a[i][k])) * (`b)[k][j]) |>; } stats = <| { `stats; (`output)[i][j] = `c; } |>; } } return stats; }

is a lot cleaner than

public static separable Code smmult(final double[][] a, Code b, Code output, int l, int m, int n) { Code stats = <| { } |>; for(int i = 0; i < l; i++) { for(int j = 0; j < m; j++) { final int ii = i; final int jj = j; Code c = <| 0.0 |>; for(int k = 0; k < n; k++) { final int kk = k; if(a[i][k] == 0.0) continue; else if(a[i][k] == 1.0) c = <| `c + (`b)[kk][jj] |>; else c = <| `c + (`(lift(a[ii][kk])) * (`b)[kk][jj]) |>; } stats = <| { `stats; (`output)[ii][jj] = `c; } |>; } } return stats; }