CHANGES.md

Changes

Blade JIT allows us to re-assess a few things about Blade and introduce greater flexibility and security to the language and runtime in general.

• const keyword for declaring constants.
• Everything except nil is now an object — even numbers and boolean.
• A new way for type validation: Formerly, to verify if a value is of a type, we use one of the is_* functions. For example, we have the built-in function is_string. This gave rise to too many built-in functions using up words that would have made good variable names and therefore easy to overwrite. With the new update to the language, we can do string.get_class() == String. Since get_class() is a method available of all objects, this is less easy to overwrite and thereby leads to a more secure code.
• Reinstated try..catch..finally.. exception handling construct as the catch..as.. introduced an insecure overhead to emulating the finally.. behavior which itself is a great requirement for secure code.
• Variadic function and methods arguments must be assigned a name at the point of declaration and the automatically declared variable __args__ is no longer declared. E.g. def my_function(...my_arg). This allows for more flexibility and intentionality in variadic function handling.
• All objects now automatically declare the to_string() instance method and all classes have an automatic to_string() function if they fail to declare an override. For this reason, the to_string() built-in function is no longer available.
• String and List no longer have a .length() method but rather have a .length property. This property carries a restriction that they cannot be overwritten.
• Dictionary no longer exposes the .length() method. Instead, the .size() method has replaced it.
• All builtin methods can now also be accessed via their class. This removes ambiguity between methods and functions when overwritten by a program. For example, before, should a dictionary contain an object length, it automatically becomes impossible for us to get the length of that dictionary as .length() will return the new declaration. By allowing calling object methods directly from their class, one can still get the length of the dictionary by via the class by calling Dictionary.size(my_dict).