_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

Over 2018, ZPE has improved more than ever. Here is just a sample of the new language features brought through the year 2018:

• Performance is better than ever.
• The syntax is cleaner than ever.
• Its name is now a recursive acronym and much easier to say.
• It's more object-oriented than ever before. Object inheritance was added. Objects performance has been improved.
• TYPO was finally brought to the language.
• Native methods for objects were brought to the language.
• Error objects were added.
• Pre-increment and pre-decrement syntaxes were changed to be in line with other languages such as PHP - this was one of the most requested features back in the early days of ZPE. 
• A new FOR LOOP, the FOR EACH IN LOOP was added.
• The circumflex (^) for representing the power value, e.g. 5^2 is now part of the syntax
• More syntactic sugar was added to the compiler, such as the IF...THEN statements. The fat arrow syntax for lambda functions was added. elseif can now be written as else if as well.
• Value caching with the cache_value and read_cache allow programs to save information for later.
• If statements can have values assigned within them. E.g. if(($v = 10) == 10) 
• Python-style fixed arrays have now been added
• The interactive interpreter has been improved by miles - it performs better and doesn't stop when it has an error.
• Further refinement to 'everything is a function' strategy where the whole program runs within a function has been furthered.
• The internal updater has now been added

What's still left for development in 2019 then? Well, the answer is that there is a ton of stuff still to be done. For a start, I'd like to improve the performance of the LAMP parser considerably. There is definitely scope for improvement there. It will be a drop in replacement for the current LAMP parser too since the LAMP parser implements the ZPELAMP interface.

ZPE will also get the automatic update feature brought to it, so it will inform users when there is an update. The GUI object is also going to be one of the main focuses for the next version of ZPE. As well as that, ZPE will move further to becoming an object-oriented language by furthering the number of object-based methods within the language. 2018 also added a Python transpiler, I will continue to work on that and hopefully finish that.

What happened to ZPE 2.0?

ZPE 2.0, the C++ compiler, interpreter and runtime that was designed to replace ZPE 1.x was going to take too long to develop and I'm quite happy to work on ZPE 1.x for now as my main project. In the future I will possibly continue to work on ZPE 2.0 again.

A long-awaited feature in the ZPE was the request for an updater built-in to the interpreter and parser. So now with ZPE 1.6.8.1 you can, although a minor update, it is actually a big update for it.

This is a long awaited feature and it's very easy to do. ZPE 1.6.8.1 is now also available to download from my website as of today. To run the update, simply type:

zpe --update

By reference-style variables have yet to be fully implemented and are partially implemented in ZPE 1.6.8.x. They've been disabled within the release versions.

With 2019 just around the corner, ZPE 1.7.0 is also just about ready to be started and readied for release. ZPE 1.7.0 is bringing some performance improvements and one or two new syntax features that aim to make ZPE even better. ZPE 1.7.0 will also bring an automatic updater, expanding on what ZPE 1.6.8.1 brought. Unfortunately, ZPE 1.6.9 which I had hoped to bring out before the end of the year, has been scraped due to the lack of time.

ZPE has very recently made objects a staple part of the language. But did you know that all variables within an object are actually references? What I mean is that if you change a variable (property) within an object in ZPE it will actually update the object.

$o = {$x : 10}
//Will print 10
print($o->$x)
$o->$x = 50
//Will print 50
print($o->$x)

So what does this mean and just how can it be brought further into ZPE? Well this exact concept will be used in ZPE 1.6.8 (December 2018) to bring forward by reference variables. These variables have sort of existed since some version 1.5.x but have found very little use. They work on a different system to ordinary variables however and a system of trust between the function itself returning what is necessary.

Whether or not ZPE 1.6.8 completely adds support for by reference or not is dependent on how much I manage to get done with regards to it, but I can say for a fact that it will be very useful as both a learning tool and as a feature of the language when it is done.

ZPE 1.6.7 is definitely set to make an uproar in comparison to many of it's predecessors. That's because of the fact that it adds more than 5 new major features ranging from the TYPO system to quick lambda functions and changes to the way references expressions work.

But now another new feature has been added - a feature that will benefit the TYPO engine considerably but has also been requested since the early days of the language development. The addition of these new types of lists has had considerable implications on the language itself too, fixed size lists are often faster to work with.

The syntax for writing one of these new lists, let's say of type string and one of type integer, each with five elements, would be:

$strings = [""] * 5
$ints = [0] * 5