Asteroid

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.

New in Release 2.0.1

• 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)
  

New in Release 1.1.4

• 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.

New in Release 1.1.3

• Fixes a fatal bug on Windows regarding the readline functionality in Python 3.10.

• Fixes a bug with escaped double quotes in strings.

New in Release 1.1.2

• 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.

New in Release 1.0.0

• 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
     end
  

• Lots of bug fixes!