Topten Software Blog

MarkdownDeep hasn't been updated for a while, but here's a few updates...

I don't usually write about graphic design because although I'm interested in it, I certainly don't consider myself a graphic artist... and I've got the history of a recent attempt to prove it.

Yesterday I released my first iPhone App - MiniComp , a simple way to run friendly competitions with your mates. Today I thought I'd write up a little about how it was built.

It's been over six months since my last post here because I've been slack and I've been busy. Also, I've found a little time to spend on PetaPoco.

I've decided to suspend development of Prefix for the time being.

Prefix now supports foreach loops but their not exactly as you might expect....

A day or two ago I wrote about Prefix' support for delegates types - which are great, but they're only half the story. To make the most of them, you really need anonymous functions and lambda expressions.

Prefix does not (and will not) have an equivalent to .NET's runtime reflection capabilities. It does however have something a little better than what JavaScript provides - introducing the typename and typeof operators...

A couple of days ago I stumbled on this great little JavaScript game tutorial and I thought it would be interesting to port it to Prefix as an example of something a little more "real world" than the hundreds of unit tests I've been using.

In JavaScript, functions are "first-class objects" that can be stored in variables or passed as arguments to other functions. Prefix delegates are similar except they're strongly typed.

Prefix now supports arrays and starts to diverge from C#/.NET a little...

In this last week or so I've been working on getting Prefix to the point where arrays are working. Unfortunately this highlighted a couple of design flaw in generics...

After a week or so of mind melting work, Prefix now support Generics! This was a challenge both in compiling the Prefix code and in working out how to generate the required JavaScript. But since there's not much point to a strongly typed language without strongly typed collections, I'm sure the effort is worth it...

In developing Prefix I needed a reliable, flexible and fast unit testing framework. To build this I used V8 (Google's JavaScript Engine from Chrome), V8Sharp (a .NET wrapper for V8) and PetaTest (my tiny unit testing framework).

Prefix now supports interfaces and is cause for the first bit of "runtime support" code to be generated by the compiler.

For the time being, I've decided to call this language Prefix. I'm not particularly fond of it, but I just need a name - anything's got to be better than [something]. As for the project itself, static constructors and enumerated types are now working.