Executive summary of recent DWS changes from the bleeding edge:

• Compiler/parser performance improved by about 15%.
• Added support for constant records declaration.
• The $include_once directive is now supported, it will include a file only if it hasn’t been already included (be it by a previous $include_once or a regular $include).
• Fixed some issues with script-side Exception.StackTrace method for wrapped Delphi-side exceptions.
• Fixed-size arrays accesses with constant indexes are now checked at compile-time.
• Multiple minor fixes, refactorings, minor optimizations and unit test coverage improvements.

Something “big” is also brewing in the DWScript lab, if not quite ready for prime-time just yet 😉

Here is a quick summary of recent changes SVN-side for DWScript:

• static classes are now in DWS, like the Prism/C# variant, they are classes which cannot be instantiated and can only have class methods or properties, but as DWScript supports the concept of meta-classes, unlike in Prism/C#, they can be virtual and sub-classed (unless you mark them as “sealed” too, of course).

  type
     TStatic = class static
        class procedure Whatever;
     end;

  Note that a static class can only be subclassed to a static class, and can only inherit from a static class (or TObject).

• quote-delimited strings can now be used as an alternative to apostrophe-delimited strings as in JavaScript and Prism, though they are still single-line strings, like in JS and unlike in Prism.

  var hello := "bonjour l'ami";

• the final qualifier is now supported, it can be used to indicate that a method can no longer be overridden by subclasses.
• the compiler will now warn about invoking constructors on instances (rather than classes) when outside of a constructor.
• method override checks have been made stricter and compiler should now report all cases of incorrect overrides.
• new directives {$HINTS ON|OFF} and {$WARNINGS ON|OFF} are now supported, and allow to turn on/off the hints and warnings respectively.

A source archive file for DWS 2.2 preview 3 (231 kB)  is now available. This is essentially just a zip file (7zip actually) for those not using the SVN.

Changes since the last post are rather limited:

• built-in “QuotedStr” function now accepts a second quoteChar parameter.
• improved compiler robustness (keeps parsing and reporting more errors in more cases), clarified some compile errors.
• improved unit tests coverage (84.6%).

Further changes since the last archive (preview 2) are listed in the following posts:

• Function pointers, direct method implementation now in DWScript
• DWScript: Class const, more hints, RTTI…

The googlecode SVN version of DWS introduces delegates capability:

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