Factor 0.80 is out

Monday, January 30, 2006

Factor 0.80 is now available.

New help system, browsable in the UI and via the HTTP server (/responder/help). In the UI listener, invoke handbook to read the documentation root, and invoke \ foo help to look at documentation for the word foo.
Sequences:
- Association list words assoc*, set-assoc, acons and remove-assoc are gone.
- The repeated virtual sequence type is gone. Instead, the <array> word takes an initial element in addition to an initial size.
- The fill word to create a new string with an initial character repeated a certain number of times has been renamed to <string>.
- Add a new interleave ( seq quot between -- ) combinator that applies a quotation to each element of a sequence, calling another quotation in between each pair.
- Add a new <=> ( obj1 obj2 -- n ) word for comparing two objects using an intrinsic order. For numbers this is the standard order, for strings this is lexicographic order, and for words, this compares word names.
- The natural-sort ( seq -- seq ) word replaces number-sort, string-sort and word-sort.
Hashtables:
- hash* ( key hash -- [[ key value ]] ) is now hash* ( key hash -- value ? )
- hash-clear is now clear-hash
- hash-each, hash-each-with, hash-all?, hash-all-with?, hash-subset, hash-subset-with now pass the key and value separately on the stack to the given quotation, instead of passing a cons cell
- Literal syntax change: H{ [[ key value ]] ... } is now H{ { key value } }
Math:
- The sum and product words have been moved to contrib/math/.
- The mod word is now supported for ratios and floating point numbers.
- The truncate, floor and ceiling words are now supported for floating point numbers.
- The NaN, positive infinity and negative infinity floating point numbers now parse and unparse as 0.0/0.0, 1.0/0.0, and -1.0/0.0 respectively.
- The NaN value is now equal to itself under =.
- Negative and postive zero are no longer equal under =. However, the new zero? word tests if the top of the stack is a zero, and it tests for both positive and negative zero.
Streams:
- stream-format ( string style stream -- ) now takes a hashtable rather than an association list for specifying style information.
- stream-write and stream-terpri are now generic words, and there is a new with-nested-stream generic word. You can wrap your output streams in a <plain-writer> to avoid implementing these.
C library interface:
- Some alien word changes:
```
<foo> ==> "foo" <c-object> <foo-array> ==> "foo" <c-array>
```
- Support for binding to Objective C libraries is now included.
  - Normal usage of Objective C classes and methods is done using the OBJC-CLASS: and OBJC-MESSAGE: parsing words. See the example in examples/cocoa-speech.factor.
  - Objective C runtime introspection functions and structures are defined in the objective-c vocabulary.
- Added a pair of words for between Factor strings and C strings, alien>string and string>alien.

Compiler changes:

AMD64 compiler backend.
Fixed some problems with compilation of inlined recursive words.

UI changes:

Fixed invalid OpenGL calls which caused problems on Windows machines with ATI drivers, and Linux machines with the MesaGL implementation.
The listener looks different now. An expandable top area is used for browsing objects, words and help, and the stack display has been shrunk to a single status line at the bottom of the window.
A left click on a presentation now invokes the default command. A right click shows a menu of possibilities.

Bootstrap changes:

Source files are no longer loaded in the stage-2 bootstrap. Since stage-2 bootstrap runs in the interpreter, this reduces bootstrap time by a few minutes. Instead, all source files, including the compiler backend, are loaded in stage-1 bootstrap, and thus boot images are now CPU-specific. Boot images can be created as follows:
```
USE: image
"x86" make-image
"ppc" make-image
"amd64" make-image 
```

Contributed libraries:

All libraries in contrib/ have been tested and updated for recent language changes, and you can run contrib/load.factor to load all of them at once (Trent Buck)
Updated contrib/x11/ with many more examples (Eduardo Cavazos)
Added splay tree library in contrib/splay-trees.factor (Mackenzie Straight)
Improved AJAX support in contrib/httpd/. The “prototype” JavaScript library is now included (Chris Double)