Version 0.44.0 released

Published on: 2024-06-18

This minor release brings a lot of refactoring and a few breaking changes related to sigils and introduces a new concept of dot notation for symbols.

In previous releases, it was possible to use the invoke symbol (and the * sigil) to access members of a dictionary or modules, e.g. *crypto/encode to access the crypto.encode symbol of the crypto Module module. This was fine, but a little bit verbose… plus this didn’t work for setting values, for example.

As of this release, you can no longer use . in symbols, because that will be used as a namespace separator, so you’ll be able to do things like this:

{} :example (dup *) :example.square (dup dup * *) :example.cube 2 example.square example.cube puts! # Prints 64

Tip

You can run min run min-upgrade <folder> to automatically upgrade all the .min files in <folder> and all its subfolders.

BREAKING CHANGES

User-defined symbols can no longer contain dots (.).
The symbol invoke and the * sigil have been removed in favor of symbol dot notation.
The . and .. symbols have been renamed to pwd and parent-dir respectively.
The ! symbol has been removed; use system instead.
The ! sigil has been removed; use system instead.
The & symbol has been removed; use run instead.
The & sigil has been removed; use run instead.
The / sigil has been removed; use dget or symbol dot notation instead.
The % sigil has been removed; use dset or symbol dot notation instead.
The > sigil has been removed; use save-symbol innstead.
The < sigil has been removed; use load-symbol innstead.
Moved get-env, put-env, $ symbol and $ sigil from sys to global module.

New Features

It is now possible to access dictionary (and module) keys (even nested) via dot notation. This replaces the invoke symbol.
Added shell auto-completion for symbols using dot notation
Added a new color symbol to the io module to enable/disable terminal color output.
Added a new from-html symbol to the xml module to parse HTML documents and fragments.
Added a new xentity2utf8 symbol to the xml module to convert an XML entity to its corresponding UTF-8 string.
Added a new xescape symbol to the xml module to convert special XML characters into the corresponding XML entities.

Fixes and Improvements

Fixed tokenize symbol (wasn’t processing commands correctly)