Newsletters

The modular lexer

The lexical scanner has been rebuilt with the power to take over the world (eventually)! [read more…]

The sparkly new compiler

What's shinier, faster, and has cleaner error reporting? Avail's new compiler! [read more…]

Iterators and file I/O

After an epic struggle with the forces of just-so, the new face of iterators is ready. Sort of. [read more…]

Hello, World!

Today is release day, and the Avail programming language is now live. The first released version of Avail is 1.0.0 DEV 2014-04-28. This is the first major development milestone. It is not a production release, and is not recommended for mission-critical use. [read more…]

The Builder

It's been a busy few months, but now it's time to showcase the recent rework of Avail's most-used tool: The Builder. We need to put on our best (inter)face as we approach our release date and prepare to greet the world… [read more…]

Victim of Success

I thought about calling this newsletter "So-so Things Come To Those Who Wait for a Few Days", but figured that the necrohippoflagellation had to stop somewhere. Since the release of the new website, there has been a dramatic upswing in site visits and new visitors. Hello, world! Thank you for visiting our humble site! Unfortunately our site is just that, humble, even though the Avail team isn't terribly humble about what it's doing. Speaking of all-encompassing greetings…   [read more…]

Even Better Things Come to Those Who Wait for a Really Long Time?

There has been so much development since the last newsletter, that all thought of newsletters completely eluded the author until now. But Avail is finally nearing its public release, so there is a new emphasis on communicating with the world, and newsletters will finally become more frequent. Within the next few months, the Avail team plans to announce its first alpha release of the Avail programming language. But that's the future. Come see what's already happened in recent months.  [read more…]

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

In which the author barely apologizes for the ridiculously long hiatus between installments. Also, Avail ditches the 1980s computing model and goes concurrent. Those other cores aren't "extra", you know -- they're for kicking it Avail-style!  [read more…]

Wump the Wumpus

In this edition (the first public edition of the Avail programming language newsletter), we announce several additions to the Avail codebase. The first is an adaptation of Hunt the Wumpus, a text adventure game. The second is support for unwind protection in the exception handling process--the ability to execute code after an exception might have been thrown but before moving on. The third is support for computational backtracking. Backtracking enables you to specify a sequence of possible paths; the failed exploration of one path will immediately result in the exploration of the subsequent path. Using backtracking, we can solve the N queens problem in a handful of lines of elegant code!  [read more…]