This message announces the availability of wb2a1.

"WB" is a disk based (sorted) associative-array package with C, SCM,
Java, and C# libraries. These associative arrays consist of variable
length (0.B to 255.B) keys and values. Functions are provided to:

* create, destroy, open and close disk-files and associative arrays;

* insert, delete, retrieve, find next, and find previous (with
respect to dictionary order of keys); and

* The atomic `put' and `rem' operations allow associations to be
used for process mutexs.

* apply functions, delete, or modify values over a range of
consecutive key values.

The (database) disk files interoperate between the various language
libraries. The interface to the SCM Scheme implementation supports
longer data values and SLIB relational databases.

The WB implementation has a file size limit of 2^32 * block size
(default 2048.B) = 2^43 bytes (8796.GB). WB routinely runs with
databases of several hundred Megabytes. WB does its own memory and
disk management and maintains a RAM cache of recently used blocks.

Multiple associative arrays can reside in one disk file. Simultaneous
access to multiple disk files is supported. A structure checking and
garbage collecting program and a viewer are provided. Compiled, WB
occupies approximately 66 kilobytes.

WB is implemented using a variant of B-tree structure. B-trees give
slower access than hashing but are dynamic and provide an efficient
determination of successor and predecessor keys. All operations are
O(log(n)) in the size of the database. B-trees are commonly used by
database systems for implementing index structures. B-trees are
optimized for using the minimum number of disk operations for large data
structures. Prefix and suffix key compression are used for storage
efficiency in WB.

WB is free software. It is released under the GNU Public License
(GPL).

Documentation and distributions in several formats are linked from
WB's home page:

http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/WB.html

Links to distributions of WB and related softwares are at the end of
this message.

-=-=-
wb2a1 news:

* Working at ClearMethods, Ravi Gorrepati and I adapted Schlep (the
SCM to C translator) to make translators to Java and C#. The same
Scheme source for WB now translates into C, Java, and C# libraries;
WB database files inter-operate with all three libraries.

-=-=-

WB source is available from:
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/wb2a1.tar.gz
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/wb2a1.tar.gz

WB source is available from:
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/scm/wb2a1.zip
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/wb2a1.zip
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/scm/wb-2a1-1.src.rpm
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/wb-2a1-1.src.rpm
Also available as i386 binary RPM:
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/scm/wb-2a1-1.i386.rpm
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/wb-2a1-1.i386.rpm

WB comes with an interface to the Scheme implementation SCM; and
contains "wbtab.scm", SCM code allowing WB to implement SLIB
relational databases.

SCM source is available from:
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/scm/scm5e4.zip
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/scm5e4.zip
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/scm/scm-5e4-1.src.rpm
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/scm-5e4-1.src.rpm
Also available as i386 binary RPM:
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/sc...5e4-1.i386.rpm
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/scm-5e4-1.i386.rpm

SLIB is a portable Scheme library which SCM uses:
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/scm/slib3a5.zip
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/slib3a5.zip
Also available as RPM:
http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/sc...5-1.noarch.rpm
swissnet.ai.mit.edu:/pub/scm/slib-3a5-1.noarch.rpm