Tuesday, November 27, 2012

What's cooking in the EDT kitchen? - November 27

We're working on the fourth milestone of the EDT 0.8.2 release.  Here's what we accomplished in the last week:

Extensibility
  • Content assist, which needed repairs after the extensibility work we did in Milestone 3, is working again. It's driven by the types known to the compiler, with no more hard-coded information.  This was the last piece of Extensibility work for the release.
Language
  • We added ten functions to the string type. They make it much easier to manipulate text in EGL.
  • We added functions that return the day, month, and year parts of a date.
  • Work continued on the bytes type, specifically conversion of bytes data to/from XML.
  • More work was done to support classes, with the addition of abstract and static keywords.
Matt

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

What's cooking in the EDT kitchen? - November 20

We made great progress towards EDT 0.8.2 M4 last week.  In many cases, we've done more planning than coding in the first week after a milestone, but not this time.  Unfortunately I expect things to slow down this week, since most of the team is taking two or three days off for Thanksgiving.

Extensibility
  • We're making content assist work again. It's the only major feature that was broken by the extensibility features introduced in M3.
Language
  • Any expression can now be used to specify the size of a new array. Previously you had to use a literal number.
  • We finished the ternary if-then-else operator.  Its syntax is (condition) ?? true_value : false_value.  (Yes there are two question marks, not one.  They keep our parser from being confused.)
  • We started work on new functions that make it easier to work with dates and strings.
  • We have a type called AnyStruct whose value can be any "structured" type: record, handler, class, external type, or any.
Matt

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

What's cooking in the EDT kitchen? - November 13

The big news from EDT-land is that 0.8.2 Milestone 3 is finished. There's one more milestone in this release, and we'll be done with it early next year.

Our New and Noteworthy page will tell you what's in M3. It doesn't mention classes or the bytes type, which I've written about in my weekly posts, because those features weren't finished in time.  They'll be included in Milestone 4, and I doubt they'll be the only language enhancements we add.  (The official list of M4 contents hasn't been made yet.)


Matt

Version 0.8.2 Milestone 3 is available

The new milestone build is waiting for you:
Matt

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

What's cooking in the EDT kitchen? - November 7

It's testing time!  We're testing EDT 0.8.2 Milestone 3, and we'll make it available as soon as we can.