[Lrde Annonce] Vcsn 2.1 is released!

About 10,000 hours (on the calendar, not of work!) after its first public release, the Vcsn team is very happy to announce the release of Vcsn 2.1! Vcsn is a platform for weighted automata and rational expressions. It consists of an efficient C++ generic library, shell tools, Python bindings, and a graphical interactive environment on top of IPython. It is quite hard to cherry-pick a few new features that have been added in Vcsn 2.1, as shown by the 4k+ lines in the NEWS file since 2.0. For details, see http://vcsn.lrde.epita.fr/Vcsn2.1. However, here are a few headlines: - Many pages of documentation and examples have been written (see http://vcsn.lrde.epita.fr/dload/2.1/notebooks). - Now http://vcsn-sandbox.lrde.epita.fr/ provides a live demo. - Packages for popular distributions (including for Docker) are already available to simplify the installation. - Transducers are much better supported, with improved syntax and several algorithms (e.g., letterize, synchronize, partial_identity, is_functional, etc.) - Expressions now offer several sets of identities specifying how they should be normalized. More generally, input/output of expressions have been improved to match most users' expectations. New operators are accepted: `&` for conjunction, `:` for shuffle, `&:` for infiltration, `{c}` (postfix) for complement, and `<+` for deterministic choice. - When entering an automaton (e.g., with `%%automaton` in IPython) user state names are preserved. - Of course, many bugs were fixed, many algorithms were sped up, and internal details have been cleaned up. - As Easter eggs, many features have also been added, but not advertised, until we are sure of how we want them to look like. People who worked on this release: - Akim Demaille - Antoine Pietri - Canh Luu - Clément Démoulins - Lucien Boilod - Nicolas Barray - Sébastien Piat - Sylvain Lombardy - Valentin Tolmer - Yann Bourgeois--Copigny People who have influenced this release: - Alexandre Duret-Lutz - Jacques Sakarovitch - Luca Saiu To download Vcsn 2.1, and for any information, visit <http://vcsn.lrde.epita.fr/Vcsn2.1>.