AboutRelease580

Introduction

Describes changes and fixes that have been in the works since r372 of muSE.

Executive summary

Features: New object system, revamped module system, generalized get and put, OLE automation support, the and it, alternative tab-syntax, miscellaneous utility functions such as split.

Bug fixes: Lots! Scalability fixes (have used muSE to process several 10s of MB of data.) Build and run on Linux.

Other: Ceased support for MacOSX/PPC binaries.

Primary reference is the html documentation.

Features

• Better use of exception mechanism to raise conditions in builtin functions such as open-file and load.

• In-built reading and writing of XML files (a simple useful subset of XML) and JSON objects.

• Support for referring to recent computations using TheAndIt. They have the potential to dramatically reduce the need for transient local variables and make code more readable.

• The command line app now accepts filenames to load in the argument list. If you provide the --run switch, the repl will not be invoked at the end of loading all the files, thus effectively "running" the programs. You can create StandAloneExecutables using the --exe switch.

• Totally revamped prototype based ObjectSystem.

• A simple, flexible first class ModuleSystem.

• Support for OLE automation on Win32 using COM.

• Generalized get and put operations which work on muSE objects, hashtables, vectors, modules and COM objects. Properties of objects can also be accessed using support for dot syntax such as a.b.c.

• Better use of exception mechanism to raise conditions in builtin functions such as open-file and load.

• In-built reading and writing of XML files (a simple useful subset of XML) and JSON objects.

• Support for referring to recent computations using TheAndIt. They have the potential to dramatically reduce the need for transient local variables and make code more readable.

• Support for running code under timeout constraints using with-timeout-us. The runtime will raise a resumable 'timeout exception when the specified timeout occurs.

• Support for an alternative tab-syntax for those allergic to parentheses. (My guess is you'll soon become allergic to tabs, but the choice is yours :)

Misc

• for-each's argument order has been changed. The first argument is the collection over which to iterate and the second argument is th iteration function. This is a deviation from the Scheme standard. The code just doesn't read correct if the argument order is the other way.

• mk-vector and mk-hashtable now accept generator functions which can be used as a simple ``memoization'' technique.

• split splits a string into substrings separated by the given separator set.