Hi Robert
1) I'm interested in the possibility of doing Java-style verification of bytecode, so I've been studying the bytecode docs. Looking at the bytecodes, I notice that all the jump bytecodes seem to indicate that jumps are always forward jumps. Upon reflection it makes perfect sense, but I want to make sure that is a conscious design decision. It certainly makes the kinds of analysis I'm interested in easier...
Yes, it is a concious decision, since only forward jumps are required.
From what I know (and I may be wrong here), adding backward jumps would have little impact on the execution of the bytecode, but just isn't needed.
A byte code verifier would be cool :)
2) I notice that concurrency is a big unclaimed todo item. Are there any concrete plans in this direction? I'm sort of interested in this, but before I think about it too much, I was wondering what has and has not been thought about/done so far.
Tom has a working implementation of concurrency on his machine, and is just doing a bit of testing before committing. It isn't OS/machine level concurrency (it just switches thread every n instructions), but it has been implemented including MVar's. Thanks Neil