New Language Features on an Imaginary Day of the Year

Vacation coming up next week -- which in addition to meaning I get to have a good time gives me some extra hours to put into Shiro.  While there haven't been any new formal releases, the SVN repository is blooming with new stuff like multi-line comments, the ternary-operator and (finally!) a reference-counting garbage collector for anonymous functions.  All of this will be getting bundled into version 0.9, along with the following functionality:

• Optional, constraint-based strong typing, so you can create object variables that can only contain a certain type of object (basically, on-demand static typing)
• Observer methods which are called any time the variables or properties they are observing change
• Default values for function arguments
• General overhaul of ShiroChan IDE, including updating Scintilla and fixing some dangling issues with intellisense and syntax highlighting.

This will make 0.9 a nearly "feature-complete" release in terms of the language semantics; there's nothing else I plan to add to the core language after these changes (at least for now), and 1.0 will be all about building out libraries, test-code, optimization, documentation and a better web presence.

I have some ideas on the back burner about turning the Scanner into more of a LISP reader (where you can define your own semantics in the language), and possibly exposing some kind of AST structure or list-based approach to make it easier to create dynamic Shiro execution trees on the fly and run them (as opposed to having to build a string manually now and then use the ExecOp.  I'd also like to make it easier to interop with .NET objects in certain scenarios, but this might require some very core functional changes to the language and the Token object iself.  

These are post-1.0 features though.  The first mile of the marathon is almost done!  Woot.