ObjectScript / News: Recent posts

Finally got around to doing another release. This one has some interesting features:

1) Added "R" methods for binary operators. This was the plan pretty much all along, but I wanted to wait until the code settled down a bit before adding this. By now you may know how built-in operators get translated into method calls... for example "1 + 2" is the same as "1.bopPlus(2)". This is all fine and good when both arguments are the same type, but what about "a + b", where a doesn't support the operation but b does. The way it works now is that the default implementation of bopPlus will call bopPlusR of the second argument. Have a look rez/Vector.os, or oscript/data/Value.java for an idea of how this works.... read more

0.75 fixes a couple minor bugs (passing zero length array to java code, and returning from synchronized block)

BTW, the release name (0.75) is just the PRCS branch/version number, ie version #75 on the 0 (mainline) branch. It doesn't signify how close I think it is to a 1.0 release.

In unrelated news, I was reading about the new version of python, and one of it's new features, nested-scope! Hey, ObjectScript has had that for at least a year now! I kinda like the solution that python has for incorporating new features like nested scope, so I'll have to keep that in mind in case I ever want to introduce a new and possibly incompatible feature in ObjectScript.... read more

I have gotten the official approval from on high to upload src code.

Yet another quick update... I have added support for anonymous functions, for those times when you don't want to bother with a named function or type. For example, you could implement an ActionListener for GUI code as follows:

var textField = new javax.swing.JButton("0",5);
frame.add(textField);
var button = new javax.swing.JButton("Foo!");
button.addActionListener( new (function() extends java.awt.event.ActionListener() {
public function actionPerformed( evt )
{
textField.setText( 1 + textField.getText() );
}
})() );
frame.add(button);... read more

Arrg! This is taking forever. The latest word from my boss is that the corporate lawyers have ok'd releasing the src code under LGPL, and now all that needs to happen is for my boss to sit down with his boss and explain the LGPL license. The fact that we are really busy at work isn't really helping speed things along.

In the mean time I added more cool features. I added the ability to "extend" java classes and java interfaces. If you create a class that overrides a method in the java class it extends, and then pass an instance of that class to java code, calls to the overriden method will cause the objectscript method to be called, rather than the overriden java method. The same goes for interfaces. This is useful, for example, for creating AWT (or swing) user interfaces, because it lets you implement the various event listener interfaces.... read more

I made a (fairly humble) homepage, and uploaded it to sourceforge. From the homepage you can get the language reference document (still fairly rough, but it'll do for now), some sample code, and other misc links.

Hopefully I should get the go-ahead to start uploading code to the CVS server real soon now.

I'm awaiting approval from my boss to release the src code. (The src *will* be released... I've spent far to many nights and weekends working on this for it to not be released.) Hopefully this will only take a week or two. In the mean time I am going to start working on some much needed documentation on how the language works, and some examples.

Quick status of the project: the grammar is pretty stable these days; the interpreter works and appears to be pretty solid; the compiler is fairly recent code, but so far seems to be pretty stable; I need to go back and revisit the built-in types, work on a more well defined class hierarchy for the built-in types, and perhaps revisit the getMember vs. getTypeMember (which is fairly important for the built-in types, which are implemented as java classes... a java class has type members, whereas a script object has instance members... the difference becomes important when a built-in type (or java type) is subclassed by a script object.); also, need to add Thread built in type (oscript.data.OThread) so that script code can create new threads.... read more