Rev 3.5 alpha 0.5 release of ParaSail

We just released a new version (3.5 alpha 0.5) of the ParaSail compiler and virtual machine, available at the same URL as before:

    http://bit.ly/Mx9DRb

We have added some improved statistics to the virtual machine interpreter related to work stealing and region usage, and a command "stats" to view the statistics without exiting the interpreter, and "stats clear" to view and zero-out the statistics.  We will shortly be posting another blog entry about some of the more interesting results of these new statistics.

Additional updates in this release:

• The conditional expression "(if X then Y)" is now equivalent to "(if X then Y else null)"
• We now use the "<|=" operator, if available, when building up an aggregate with an iterator inside, such as "[for I in 1..10 => I*5]".  Before we used the "var_indexing" operator instead if both "<|=" and "var_indexing" were available, using the value of "I" as the index.  This didn't make much difference when building up a vector, but was somewhat limiting in other cases.
• We now allow "reverse" when defining an aggregate with an iterator, such as "[for I in 1..10 reverse => I * 5]," allowing the creation of a reverse-order vector, for example.
• We have fixed a bug which meant that certain annotations were ignored if they immediately preceded or followed a call on an operation.