New JCSP release

["P.H.Welch" <P.H.Welch@xxxxxxxxx>]

There's a new JCSP1.0-rc2 available from the usual place:

  http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/projects/ofa/jcsp/

One forced change:

  o the jcsp.lang.Timer class has changed its name to jcsp.lang.CSTimer

This is because the new JDK1.3 packages have introduced a Timer class
of their own in java.util.  Since it is common to be importing both
jcsp.lang.* and jcsp.util.*, there is a name clash.  This could have
been resolved by using fully qualified names in our Java code - e.g.

  jcsp.lang.Timer tim = new jcsp.lang.Timer ();

but that's tedious.  Another solution would be to ask Sun to change
*their* name :-) ... but I settled to change mine!

Unfortunately, the old jcsp.lang.Timer class has had to be deleted -
not simply deprecated (since that would still leave the clash and
we would have had to use java.util.Timer if we ever wanted it, not
just Timer).  This means that existing JCSP programs must change
references of Timer to CSTimer to use the new (and subsequent) releases.

Note that the CSTimer class now has its name for the same reason that
the JCSP CSProcess class is not called Process - to avoid the clash
with java.lang.process.

Aside: I think the new JDK1.3 Timer class is pretty easy to emulate
using CSP primitives ...

Other changes in JCSP1.0-rc2:

  o some improvements in the documentation (e.g. Alternative);

  o the release is packaged in a single JAR file;

  o a new applet/application demo - Fireworks!

Peter.