Re: Factor

Factor: the language, the theory, and the practice.

Factor 0.97 now available

Sunday, November 2, 2014

#release

“If birds can glide for long periods of time, then… why can’t I?” - Orville Wright

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Factor 0.97!

OS/CPU Windows Mac OS Linux
x86 0.97 0.97 0.97
x86-64 0.97 0.97 0.97

Source code: 0.97

This release is brought to you with over 1,400 commits by the following individuals:

Alex Vondrak, Andrew Pennebaker, Benjamin Pollack, Björn Lindqvist, CW Alston, Doug Coleman, Erik Charlebois, Fred Alger, Iskander Sitdikov, John Benediktsson, Jon Harper, Loryn Jenkins, Paul Woolcock, Roc King, Samuel Tardieu, Steven Stewart-Gallus, and @Profpatsch

Besides some bug fixes and library improvements, I want to highlight the following changes:

Some possible backwards compatibility issues:

  • Fixed mask? in math.bitwise to be more correct
  • Fixed bias in Mersenne Twister random number generator
  • Better support for shebang (no longer need a space after #!)
  • io-error now lives in the libc vocabulary
  • sender stubs in cocoa.messages now named by method signature
  • filter now allocates length of seq, not exemplar.
  • Removed make-assoc in favor of explicit get’s.

Some of the improvements to FUEL, Factor’s emacs mode:

  • Modernize for emacs 24.3
  • Prepare FUEL to be uploaded to MELPA
  • Change font locking and syntax highlighting
  • Make fuel-help work for vocabularies also
  • New minor mode: fuel-autohelp-mode
  • Fix word help to use correct vocabulary using list
  • Variable controlling whether fuel-mode is loaded automatically
  • Fixes to table rendering

What is Factor

Factor is a concatenative, stack-based programming language with high-level features including dynamic types, extensible syntax, macros, and garbage collection. On a practical side, Factor has a full-featured library, supports many different platforms, and has been extensively documented.

The implementation is fully compiled for performance, while still supporting interactive development. Factor applications are portable between all common platforms. Factor can deploy stand-alone applications on all platforms. Full source code for the Factor project is available under a BSD license.

New libraries:

Improved libraries: