Hi,
I am please to announce a preview release of Dao (1.0). Dao is a
simple yet powerful object-oriented programming language featured by,
optional typing, BNF-like macro system, regular expression,
multidimensional numeric array, asynchronous function call for
concurrent programming etc.
Since the last beta release (2006 november), a number of new features
have been added to the language with some significant improvements on
the implementation. Here I will just list some of them:
-
Added a new typing system, so that the type of an variable can be
either declared explicitly or inferred implicitly, and type checking
is performed at compiling time when possible. More over the type
information is used for function overloading and function
specialization (with type-optimized VM instructions) according to
paramter types. Some types can be compounded into new types, e.g.,
list, tuple<int,map<string,int>>… -
A flexible macro-system that allows writting macro in a form close
to BNF, and can be used to define new syntax; -
Added Asynchronous Function Call (AFC) and Message Passing
Interface (MPI) for further support for concurrent and distributed
programming (still experimental); -
Added a few new data types, in particular, among which, there is
the new tuple type in which each of the items is typed independently,
for example, if a tuple is consisted of an integer and a string, then
the type of the tuple will be tuple<int,string>; Moreover the items of
a Dao tuple can have field names. -
The internal data storage scheme is improved to reduce memory
overheads for simple types. -
Added special support for the main() function, so that the comand
line arguments are mapped to the function parameters, and are checked
against the paremeter types of main(). -
Improved representation of C/C++ types, so that their inheritance
relationships can be still valid in Dao, and they can be derived by
Dao classes directly.
Moreover, this release has included a tool (tools/autobind.dao) which
can do semi-automated wrapping of C/C++ libraries. In fact, many of
the modules released this time are generated by this tool. Just to
list the modules released this time:
DaoCamellia (image processing),
DaoCGI (CGI Web programming),
DaoCLoader (running time wrapping of C libraries, slightly similar to
the ctype module of Python),
DaoDataModel (database handling, can be used to set up mappng between
data tables and Dao class types),
DaoFastCGI (CGI Web programming),
DaoLapack (linear algebra library),
DaoMagick (image processing),
DaoMGL (math plotting),
DaoMySQL (database),
DaoOpenGL (3D graphics),
DaoSDL (multi-media),
DaoTCC (embedding C codes into Dao scripts),
DaoXML (handling XML documents and fetching web pages from web
servers),
DaoZlib (compression),
DaoVTK (3D data and model visualization).
I believe this release has become suitable for some practical
applications, and worth to be tried out. Then a formal release of the
1.0 version will be made available during this august or september. I
would be very grateful, if anyone can give me some suggestions for
improvement, and feature requests are of couse also welcome. Thanks
and
enjoy,
Limin
homepage: http://www.xdao.org
sourceforge project: Dao Language download | SourceForge.net
download:
Dao Language - Browse /dao-1.0/daovm-1.0-preview at SourceForge.net