Words in TBS

An image of the words used in the entire TBS source code.

Just for fun, I generated this image of the TBS source code with Wordle today. I find it quit interesting that I use the word "value" the most. The Tokent.kind is something that I actually never use, I believe it should be 2 words: "Token" and "t.kind".

After that I decided to create another one, but this time of my blog posts:

An image of the words used in the posts of this blog.

As I expected, the most used word was TBS.

Variable access changes

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Winston Churchill

Alpha-2.9 was supposed to be released this weak, however I have decided to change a little thing about the way you can access variables. Instead of only using '?' for declarations, the question mark will now be used in front of all variables, similar to the PHP syntax.
For example, the following:

?greeting =~ "Hello!";

!out(~greeting, ~"\n");

Will now be written as:

?greeting =~ "Hello!";
!out(~?greeting, ~"\n");

I am aware of the fact that this is a big change that will affect almost all TBS code, although there should be no problem with this as alpha versions do not guarantee backwards compatibility.

alpha-2.9

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

Alfred Lord Tennyso
Because of the huge amount of changes for alpha-3, I have decided to release another version between 2 and 3 which will have all language features but will however not include the new STDL.

I know that I have not been posting for a while but that does not mean I haven’t worked on TBS. I shall release this subversion in this or in the next week.

Help testing TBS

You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.

Zig Ziglar

You might be interesting in testing TBS alpha-3 or to help me finding bugs. If you are please send me an email. If you found one or more bugs you will be given credit for finding bugs when I release the next version(currently alpha-3). So please, do not hesitate and help testing!

alpha-3: casting to string

But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensible luxury, but a simple necessity.

-Niklaus Wirth
 
You may know that in alpha-1 and 2 you can use the str subroutine to cast from an integer to a string. For example:

?number =~ "PI = ";
number = 3,141592654;
!out(~number, ~!str(number));

Output:

PI = 3,141592654

In alpha-3 str also accepts a 3th, optional argument. Notice that the above example would produce the following output in alpha-3:

PI = 3

This 3th argument is the decimal precision, and it's default value is 0. The following:

?number =~ "PI = ";
number = 3,141592654;
!out(~number, ~!str(number, 10));

 Will thus produce:

PI = 3,1415926540

15 reasons why I prefer gedit

IDE features are language smells.

-Reg Braithwaite

I do not use any IDE, I just use gedit. Simply because gedit offers me what an IDE offers me. In this post, I'll be telling you 15 reasons why I prefer gedit above an IDE or another text editor.

The current state on alpha-3

And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

Jeff Hawkins

This is just a short update on alpha-3, to show that I'm still working on TBS(I didn't post much because of that, in fact).
The last days I have been reorganizing the structure of TBS. I have, and probably will still, encountered some bugs but luckily I succeeded in fixing all of them. This means that I can now continue with restructuring the code. I also added the ability to provide less arguments than needed(see last post) and I added the first feature of the environment subroutine: OS checking.