Whiley v0.3.33 Released!

Wednesday, April 8th, 2015

The next release of Whiley is upon us!! Work got a little bogged down with the start of term, but should hopefully now pick up a little.  The main component of this release is the removal of the string and char data types from the language. This is quite a big change, but is in line with my efforts to simplify the language. Instead of string, we now simply have a list of integers. Furthermore, we can constrain these integers to be, for example, ASCII or UTF8, etc.

  • Removed string and char data types (#432).  As discussed above, this is a fairly large change.  In particular, it required updating a large number of the test cases and benchmarks.

  • Removed protected modifier (#448). The protected modifier was not really implemented and, although it’s a good idea, for now I’ve left it out.  This is something to be scheduled for proper inclusion down the track.

  • Removed WyIL Method / Function Cases (#475).  Method / function cases were originally included to support overloading on pre- and post-conditions.  However, this hasn’t been supported for a long time now.  Furthermore, with the advent of proper nominal type information at the WyIL level, we can get a very similar effect by using named types.

  • Removed implicit imports (#479). Following Java, I originally chose to have the package whiley.lang.* implicitly imported in every source file.  However, this exception was clearly a bad idea, not least because I want to imagine Whiley programs which are not necessarily connected with the standard library.  Therefore, this is removed and all test cases and benchmarks have been updated.

  • Improved Error Messages for Loop Invariants (#486). Prior to v0.3.32, error messages were being reported correctly for loop invariants.  However, with the introduction of the Invariant bytecode, some issues arose and I resorted to a temporary fix for reporting error messages.  This is now fixed.

In addition to these updates, I’ve also been through and updated the Whiley Language Specification and the Getting Started with Whiley tutorial accordingly.  All up, this release is definitely an improvement over v0.3.32, although there is still a way to go before things are properly back on track.