List of features

[brice-morin]

• Abstract functions so as we can have PIM statecharts and just implement functions in a PSM thing
• external things to replace protocols. Things can define ports and properties and be instantiated many times
• Byte/Bit operations
• composite types (struct like) packed (array) and not packed (memory-aligned)
• Prevent a thing from including two statecharts
• for each loop for arrays (maybe two types: to iterate over elements and to iterate over indexes). The rationale is to avoid common bugs when iterating through arrays in a while loop (typically not incrementing the index)
• dafault/basics datatypes
• Time/Timers directly in the language. The rationale is that almost everyone uses timers, either through protocols or through things, and it would be good to have a unified way of dealing with time directly in ThingML (e.g. as asked by @oysteinh)
• CEP
• switch/case, which can simplify long series of if/else if

[jakhog]

Some thoughts about for each loops

It would be nice to have two different syntaxes if you want to loop over the variable or the indices, like:

foreach ( value in array ) do
   ...
end

(the type of the value is given by the type of the array) and:

foreach ( index i : Integer in array ) do
   ...
end

And maybe break/continue in both foreach and while loops :)

---

Brice:
Or a combined one:

for index, value in array do
   ...
end

The compilers could make some optimizations if we only use index or value.

---

Jakob:
Yes, a combined one also makes sense. But I guess it should be required to specify the type of the index so that the compiler doesn't need to guess. And I also like the idea of using an index keyword (and possibly value as well) so that it is clear what is the value and what is the index.

[skorsky]

CEP as a feature: does this mean based on ReactiveX or in connection with Apama? What are the plans for a feature?

[ffleurey]

This is more a a meta-issue and whould be broken down in individual feature requests