Hi, there, It is my great pleasure to announce the first release of ATS2, the successor of the ATS programming language. The compiler of ATS2 is given the name ATS/Postiats, ATS2/Postiats or simply Postiats. To compile this release, all one essentially needs is gcc. In particular, there is no need for ATS1. The official website for ATS is: http://www.ats-lang.org ATS-Postiats is hosted at github: https://github.com/githwxi/ATS-Postiats Major releases of ATS2 are available at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ats2-lang/ The current plan is to host the development of ATS2 at github and releases of ATS2 at sourceforge. The actual implementation of ATS2 started in March of 2011, and it took about two and one-half years to reach this stage. As of now, the code base for the compiler of ATS2 consists of 140,000+ lines of code (LOC), which are nearly all written in ATS1. When compared to ATS1, the single most important new feature is the template system of ATS2. This is a feature that could potentially change the way a programmer writes his or her code. One can certainly feel that this is a very powerful feature (a bit like feeling that OOP is a very powerful feature). However, how this feature should be properly and effectively used in practice needs a lot more investigation. Another thing about ATS2 is that it is a lot leaner than ATS. One can make good use of ATS2 without any need for compiled library (libatslib.a). Also, GC support in ATS1 is now removed; if needed, third-party GC (e.g., Bohem-GC) can be readily employed. This release is a bit rushed as I will start teaching a course based on ATS2 tomorrow. If you spot problems, please let me know. Cheers, --Hongwei Computer Science Department Boston University 111 Cummington Street Boston, MA 02215 Email: hwxi@... Url: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~hwxi Tel: +1 617 358 2511 (office) Fax: +1 617 353 6457 (department)