Hyper compiler 0.3.34 released

There it is again, another release. It has some very nice new features. The most exciting new thing of this release is ironically not the compiler, but the syntax highlighter.

The syntax highlighter was, before this release, a very simple program. You gave it two file parameters: the first was an existing source file and the second was the name for the HTML file that needed to become the syntax-highlighted version of the original source code. The output file was HTML 4.01 transitional. The new version of the highlighter generates valid strict XHTML 1.0! It was an easy improvement, almost nothing more than replacing the doctype. OK, this change is not very important to most people. But a totally different functionality has been added as well.

The idea for a new feature came from the fact that writing documentation on my website is difficult. Explaining the language is a difficult and time consuming task. But writing example code to illustrate things was just horrible. It required manual construction of a "pre" tag with some sourcecode, interleaved with "span" tags for highlighting. And when an example needed to be changed the highlighting had to be corrected. I did not like this at all, so I figured out a way to have the syntax highlighter do this boring and error-prone task. Now I can write the documentation, have the examples as plain text in the HTML file in a special comment (so they are still very readable), and the syntax highlighter processes the HTML file and generates the highlighted version directly inside the file. Now when I change an example I can just change the sourcecode in the HTML file and then run the highlighter on it to have the desired result.

The changes in the compiler itself are mostly directed towards the back end that needs to be written. First, it now supports dynamic arrays. This is needed to be able to write container classes in the language. Checking for 'static' things is now complete as well. This is of course needed for code generation because for every non-static procedure call an object instance is required, so the compiler must be able to find it. Other important changes are mostly internal. Constant folding is now implemented for a small part of the types, and the operators of the built-in types are now represented as classes specialized for each built-in type. And also some bugfixes this time. I discover little of them, because I am (as far as I know) the only tester. You can of course improve this!