
                   NEW FEATURES in version 2.0.2.

This release couple of minor parser enchancements:

1. Relaxed locking in JEL gnu.jel.ImageLoader
   Previous versions had loadClass method synchronized, which was working
   well before, but started to produce deadlocks on a recent verson of 
   Oracle JRockit JVM. I have relaxed the locking to absolute minimum now,
   which should avoid the deadlocks and improve performance for all.

2. Java 5 binary
   Since the version 2.0.1 JEL is compiled by Java 6 compiler, which prevented
   some of the Java 5 users from using the recent version of the library.
   From now on the distribution includes lib/jel_jdk5.jar, which is built
   from the recent codebase by Java 6 compiler, but with options to make it
   compatible with Java 5 JVMs. Due to the fact that new Java 6 classfile
   format added new tables for bytecode verification, jel_jdk5.jar
   is smaller than jel.jar .

   JEL itself generates bytecode in Java 5 format. The shift of classfile
   verification processing from classloading to compilation phase, facilitated
   by new Java 6 classfile format, does not make sense for JEL-compiled
   expressions. They are usually compiled and loaded only once during
   the program runtime.

3. The TAB characher is now considered whitespace and is ignored by JEL
   Parser .

4. Hexadecimal integer literals are now allowed to overflow to
   negative values. That is "0xFFFFFFFF" now literally means "-1"
   instead of throwing an error.

5. Some minor spelling fixes.

                       PLANNED FEATURES

1. Allowing to call methods with variable number of arguments in JEL
   expressions.


May 14 2015
           Konstantin Metlov.
