Asteroid is a modern, multi-paradigm programming language that supports first-class patterns. More details can be found at the website asteroid-lang.org. Documentation on Asteroid can be found at asteroid-lang.readthedocs.io.
We now support the ASTEROIDPATH environment variable which is expected to have a colon seperated list of directories to search for user defined modules.
The logical operators 'and' and 'or' are now evaluated in short-circuit fashion.
Files loaded with the 'load' statement are now considered modules and work similarly to Python modules.
Added the 'toplevel' function which returns true if control is in the module originally loaded by the interpreter.
Added the match statement similar to the match statement in Python.
No longer supports type hierarchies for the primitive types. The functions in the 'type' module are now considered builtins. The 'type' module itself has been eliminated.
The Minimal Asteroid Debugger (MAD) replaces ADB in this release.
The shorthand conditional pattern can now be applied to arbitrary patterns. E.g. The pattern
(a,b,c):(%integer,%integer,%integer)constrains the triple (a,b,c) to be a triple of integers. The above shorthand conditional pattern is equivalent to the conditional pattern,
(a,b,c) if (a,b,c) is (%integer,%integer,%integer)Allows pattern constraint operator to map certain variables that a pattern matched to be bound into the current scope.
Supports a new OS module.
Supports iteration over tuple components
The eval function has been extended to strings for the interpretation of
Asteroid programs in those strings.
Structures now support a __str__ member function that allows the user
to specify a string representation of the structure.
Updated user and reference guides.
Lots of bug fixes.
Fixes a fatal bug on Windows regarding the readline functionality in Python 3.10.
Fixes a bug with escaped double quotes in strings.
An experimental implementation of an interactive debugger that supports debugging pattern matching and in particular, pattern matching with first-class patterns.
A Python API allowing the developer to call the Asteroid interpreter from within a Python program and also embed Python code in an Asteroid program.
Eliminated the stride notation in list comprehensions and replaced it with the step notation.
Lots of bug fixes.
Interpreter line-editing features similar to Python include interactive editing, history substitution and code completion on systems that support the GNU Readline library.
New object-based modules for system modules. For example the functions within the
io module are now accessed with the @ operator,
load system io.
io @println "Hello, World!".In the absence of explicit return statements the last expression evaluated within a function body provides an implicit return value, e.g.,
function inc
with i do
i+1
endLots of bug fixes!