ezr² development update (Mar 5, 2024)

Another (newer) development update for ezr²!

What I’ve Been Doing

Major bugfix! And I have finished what I said I’d do in the last update.

Bug fixes

Dictionaries are fixed!

There was a _{^{teensy-weensy}} bug with ezr² dictionaries.

Keys in a dictionary are supposed to be immutable, you could add a key and remove it, nothing more, nothing less.

Well…

> item a: [1]
[1]
> item b: {a:5}
{[1] : 5}
> a + 6
nothing
> a
[1,6]
> b
{[1, 6] : 5}

This bug has existed, well, since the start of ezr² development! Now it’s fixed!

How?

I’ve added a new interface called IEzrMutableObject. Any object of which values can be changed, has to inherit from IEzrMutableObject. Objects like EzrList, EzrDictionary, EzrCharacterList and EzrClassInstance.

You only have to implement one function, as shown here:

    public class EzrList : EzrObject, IEzrMutableObject
    {
        ...
        
        public IMutable<IEzrMutableObject>? DeepCopy(RuntimeResult result)
        {
            List<EzrObjectReference> copy = [];
            for (int i = 0; i < Value.Count; i++)
            {
                EzrObjectReference newReference = new(Value[i].Object, Value[i].AccessibilityModifiers);
                if (newReference.Object is IEzrMutableObject mutableElement)
                {
                    IEzrObject? objectCopy = (IEzrObject?)mutableElement.DeepCopy(result);
                    if (result.ShouldReturn)
                        return null;

                    newReference.UpdateObject(objectCopy!);
                }

                copy.Add(newReference);
            }

            return new EzrList(copy, Context, StartPosition, EndPosition);
        }
    }

To facilitate this, the types Context, EzrObjectReference and RuntimeEzrObjectDictionary have also implemented similar functions.

Breaking changes.

Class definitions.

So, last update, I said I would implement this syntax for class definitions:

object something_3 do
    constant function initialize with b, c do
        this.b: b
        this.c: c
    end
end

It’s finished now! Yaay!

Also, classes will now be called classes, instead of ‘object type’-s. But this is only a change in the source code, not syntax.

Conclusion

Well, so that’s it for this ezr² update. It was another short one!