Bex 1.2 released

Bex 1.2 is out, get it while it's hot. Since I'm such a lazy blogger I'll just copy the release notes here.

This release adds a few new features and fixes a few bugs.Anyway the most important new thing is the bexlib concept which is supposed to become a place where new functionality can be added without bloating the default.bex environment too much. For starters there are some classpath manipulation routines, some common binary codecs (hex and base64) and additional FPish utilities for manipulating collections (map,reduce and filter). The only backward incompatibility is the removal of collection.join function which should be replaced with the reduce function from the functional libarary.

Now if I only could get myself into updating the documentation this would actually be useful... Well, maybe later.

Fixed class version problems

For some reason the bex-1.1.jar released on Oct 1th only worked with JDK 1.6. With older JDKs it failed with: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file. I did a rebuild and uploaded a new bex-1.1.jar. Now it works in JDK 1.5 or later. It still fails to start with 1.4.2 since the new support for .bexrc uses System.getenv, which conveniently throws a java.lang.Error in JDK 1.4. This will hopefully be fixed in the next release 1.1.1. Other known bugs with release 1.1 are that \" or \$ character sequences are not allowed in multiline strings.

Bex 1.1 released

I happy to announce that bex 1.1 is out and available for download. I decided to follow the release early, release often principle, so this release doesn't contain that much new. The biggest change is the support for embedded expressions in strings. This feature was requested by a few people and I needed it myself as well. So now you can write things like:

foo = "world"
print("hello ${foo}")

Inside the expression quotes ${} you can have basically any valid bex expression. Combined with multiline strings, this feature makes it very convenient to generate formatted text. Full list of changes is availbale at sourceforge.

I also updated the manual to describe the currently supported built-ins and extensions. Happy scripting!

Bex 1.0 released

The first public release of bex script is out. Bex script is my attempt to make an "improved" BeanShell with a strong emphasis on functional programming. If nothing else, I hope that it at least serves as a wakeup call to BeanShell developers. That once so nice and powerful language is quickly becoming obsolete since its development has effectively stopped.

Welcome to blog expressions

Lately I've had serveral moments where I have thought: Hmm, if I had a blog I would write about this in there. Well now I have one, so let's see if those thoughts keep coming up. This blog will mostly be about my spare time programming projects and perhaps some rants / opinions on "hot topics" related to programming in general. So how did I come up with this name for my blog? The name comes from my current project: bex script where bex stands for block expressions.