[racket-dev] Release Announcement for v5.1.2

Suggested release announcement follows, with crappy descriptions that
I added as an initial skeleton.  Please tell me which ones need to be
removed, send suggested edits including order changes, and tell me
about things that are not included.

* Racket now comes with "places" -- a different approach for
  parallelism.  (Now used for parallel compilation of the Racket
  tree.)

* New x86_64 builds for Windows, OS X, and two Debian flavors.

* Most "body" contexts (function body, `cond', etc) accept a mix of
  definitions and expressions.

* `for' and related loops have a new `#:unless' keyword as a synonym
  for `#:when' and a negated condition; positive integers can now be
  used as sequences.

* `assoc' accepts an optional argument for the comparison function
  to be used.

* A new `multi-in' require form makes it easy to require several
  modules that come from a single directory (or same-named files
  from multiple directories).

* `procedure-arity-includes?' reports #f for keyword-requiring procs
  by default.

* New `compose1' -- composes functions where the pipeline carries
  only single values.  This is useful to avoid inadvertent bugs when
  I/O arities of composed functions changes.

* New in `racket/function': `identity' `thunk' `thunk*'

* New `ffi/winapi' module for use with Windows functions that use
  the Windows API (same as `stdcall' on 32 bits).

* Syntax certificates are gone, instead, there is now a new "syntax
  taints" system.  (Notes about migrating?)

* The license has been clarified: we now use LGPLv2.1 uniformly.
  (The license file used to specify LGPLv2, contrary to the download
  pages.)


* `net/url' can now be used with `https'.  (Warning: by default it
  accepts any site, equivalent to ignoring your browser's warnings.)

* New racket/contract/combinator library and some contract module
  reorganization (this is in 21cbd9ad)

* Simplified error messages in student languages, and use colors to
  add visual information (see the teachpack manual for guidelines on
  writing teachpacks).  (Is this the right place?  IIRC it moved.)

* New `scriblib/bibtex' that can read bibliographic databases in
  bibtex format.

* Sam, Vincent: TR news?  (Many new types from Eric Dobson?
  Optimizer logs?)

* Matthias: 2/HtDP news?

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!