From: Bernard Lambeau <blambeau@...>
Date: 2011-07-13T22:45:44+09:00
Subject: [ANN] alf 0.9.1 Released

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Hi all!

I'm pleased to announce that alf 0.9.1 has been released and pushed
to rubygems.org! See changes below.

= Alf -- Relational Algebra at your fingertips

* <http://rubydoc.info/github/blambeau/alf/master/frames>
* <http://github.com/blambeau/alf>
* <http://rubygems.org/gems/alf>

Alf brings the relational algebra both in Shell and in Ruby. In Shell,
because
manipulating any relation-like data source should be as straightforward as
a
one-liner. In Ruby, because I've never understood why programming languages
provide data structures like arrays, hashes, sets, trees and graphs but not
_relations_... Let's stop the segregation ;-)

Changes:

# 0.9.1 / 2011.07.13

* Enhancements (public APIs)

  * Added the in-memory Alf::Relation data structure and associated tooling.
    This allows using Alf in a object-oriented usual way, in addition to the
    functional DSL:

        Alf.lispy.evaluate {
          (join (restrict :suppliers, lambda{ status > 10 }), :cities)
        }

    is equivalent to

        suppliers, cities = [...], [...]
        suppliers.restrict(lambda{ status > 10 }).join(cities)

    see README about how to obtain suppliers and cities relations in the
first
    place.

  * Summarize now accepts a --allbut option, to specify 'by' attributes from
an
    exclusion perspective

  * .alf files are now evaluated in such a way that backtraces are
"traceability
    friendly"

* Non backward-compatible changes to public APIs

  * Lispy#with has been removed because not being stable enough. The clean
way
    of reusing sub-queries is as follows (non purely functional, so far)

        kept_suppliers = (restrict :suppliers, lambda{ status > 10 })
        with_countries = (join kept_suppliers, :cities)
        supplying      = (join with_countries, :supplies)
        (summarize supplying,
                   [:country],
                   :which => Agg::group(:pid),
                   :total => Agg::sum{ qty })

  * As a consequence, named data sources (Symbols, like :suppliers above)
are
    now resolved at compile time, which is less powerful, yet much simpler
and
    sound.

  * Nest and Unnest have been renamed to Wrap and Unwrap respectively. This
is
    to better conform to TUTORIAL D's terminology.

  * Lispy#chain was kept public in 0.9.0 by error and has been entirely
removed
    from the DSL.

* Enhancements (internals)

  * Reader.reader delegates to Reader.coerce when its first argument is not
    a String. This allows calling Reader.reader(args.first || $stdin) in
quickl
    commands for example.

  * Operator, Operator::Relational and Operator::NonRelational have a .each
    class method that yields operator classes

* Bug fixes

  * Fixed a bug that led to an Nil error when using unary operators on
$stdin
  * Fixed a bug when summarizing or sorting on Symbol attributes with ruby
1.8
  * Fixed numerous crashes under rubinius

Have a nice day!!
Bernard

-- 
PhD Student, Computer Science Department, EPL/INGI, UCLouvain, Belgium
Mail:    blambeau@gmail.com
Mobile:  +32 477 24 58 61
Blog:    http://revision-zero.org/
Code:    http://github.com/blambeau/
Follow:  http://twitter.com/blambeau/

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