Monday, March 26, 2003 Announcement ============ The members of the Components Team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are pleased to announce the beta release of Babel, version 0.8.2. What's New ========== The following features have been added, or completed, in this release: + Completed Phase II FORTRAN 90 support (tested with Portland Group compiler on Linux) -> Support for derived type pointers -> Generate an F90 module for each array type + Completed considerable changes to the organization of the User's Guide and started appendices for acronyms, error messages, SIDL backend, and XML backend + Babel 101 documentation reflects 0.8.x command line arguments and grammar + Added "--comment-local-only" command line option + Bugs 402 (jar -u) and 493 (Babel101.html) fixed (see http://www-casc.llnl.gov/bugs for more details) Backward Compatibility Issues ============================= + F77 _cast method has changed to allow casting from any type to any allowable type in a single method call (Also refer to the CHANGES file for more details.) What Babel Is ============= Babel is designed to address problems of language interoperability, particularly in scientific/engineering applications. At the simplest level, Babel generates glue code so that libraries written in one programming language are callable from other programming languages. Babel generates this glue code from an interface description written in SIDL, our Scientific Interface Definition Language. Babel supports full Object-Oriented features and exception handling even in non-OO languages such as C or Fortran77. Supported Languages =================== Babel currently supports calling libraries written in C, C++, F77, or Python from drivers written in either C, C++, F77, Python or Java. (Python support also requires the Numerical Python set of extensions at http://numpy.sourceforge.net/ ) Supported Platforms =================== Linux Solaris (More expected in next few months.) Broken Platforms (hopefully to be resurrected) ============================================== Cygwin Caveat ====== Babel is research in progress. This is a beta release looking for more friendly users and now some power users. Babel has been used on a few real projects now, there are still too few examples, but the documentation is improving. Availability ============ The software is available for free download at http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/components User Resources ============== Two email lists have been set up for the Babel community: babel-users@llnl.gov (unmoderated discussions) babel-announce@llnl.gov (announcements only) To subscribe to one or both of these email lists, send email to with the text "subscribe babel-announce", "subscribe babel-users", or both (one per line). Contacting the Authors ====================== If you have any questions or concerns with the installation process or usage of Babel, feel free to contact the project team at components@llnl.gov. To report bugs or suggest feature enhancements, please submit a report in the bug database at http://www-casc.llnl.gov/bugs/ . $Id: ANNOUNCE-0.8.2.txt 788 2003-04-07 17:06:12Z epperly $