Nu-0.2.4

Wednesday December 12, 2007

See the downloads page for another small release. It was built on OS 10.4 and tested on OS 10.4 and 10.5. It contains two fairly significant additions and a couple of other minor enhancements.

First, this release contains changes that allow us to write methods that return objects by reference. To do so, use the new (id *) argument type in method declarations. The corresponding arguments will then be bridged as instances of the NuReference class.
See Adam Thorsen's blog for a great example of this; it uses Nu reference arguments to write a CoreData validation method.

This release also contains preliminary support for the BridgeSupport files that Apple included in OS 10.5. To use it, first load the bridgesupport code with (load "bridgesupport") then import any desired frameworks with the new import macro: (import Cocoa) The reader is a quick-and-simple implementation that is not tuned for speed, so it is probably too slow for production use. Use it to look up symbol values that you need as you develop your application.

Other changes include new min and max operators, an enhancement to the "+" operator to allow string concatenation, a somewhat less dirty hack to turn off an annoying and innocuous warning message, and a new file "fscript.nu" that contains a function that loads the F-Script browser from Nu (requiring F-Script, of course). Use (fs-browse myObject) to browse your favorite objects.