[pure-lang-users] Pure 0.6 round out

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi everybody,

this is *not* a release announcement (Pure 0.6 isn't out yet, I hope to 
get to that in the next few days). But as I've fallen a bit silent 
lately, here is a quick summary of the new stuff in the forthcoming 0.6 
release, as it's taken shape in svn during the past two weeks. If you 
still have some bug reports, now is the time!

(Eddie, I haven't forgotten about the matrix/vector stuff, but with all 
the important new features already in 0.6, I just think it's better to 
do a release now and then start working on the GSL support immediately.)

- Macros: These are implemented as rewriting rules which are applied at 
compile time, and can be used for all usual preprocessing purposes, 
including the optimization and inlining of function calls at the source 
level, and the programming of user-defined special forms. And of course 
they're "hygienic".

- Thunks a.k.a. "futures": These are realized as anonymous parameterless 
closures (a la Alice ML) which are "called by need" (including 
memoization), and are used to implement lazy data structures. As a 
showcase, the prelude now implements lazy lists a.k.a. "streams".

- Private namespaces. You can now declare symbols as private in a 
module, to hide away internal helper functions and constructor symbols, 
and to keep the global public namespace clean.

- Sentries (object finalizers) and references (mutable expression 
pointers). File objects in the system module now employ sentries in 
order to close themselves when they're garbage-collected.

- New interactive startup files (.purerc). These are just normal Pure 
scripts with additional definitions for interactive usage.

- The 'list' command was renamed to 'show' (to avoid a clash with the 
prelude function 'list'), and a new 'dump' command was added. The latter 
is similar to 'show', but saves a snapshot of your current interactive 
environment in a file.

- User-defined hook for the expression printer (__show__). This allows 
you to define your own custom print representations for expressions at 
runtime.

- Syntax highlighting for gedit (contributed by Eddie Rucker, thanks!).

The manual has been updated, too, so you can find further details there.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag