I’ve recently been working on Slang, my scripting language for Flash, and yesterday I accidentally rewrote the entire thing. I started out refactoring of the parser, and ended up completely redesigning the way the language is executed.

The biggest internal change is that source must now be compiled before execution. This allows for a performance boost when running scripts multiple times, as the bytecode can be cached. Compiling is still quite fast, though, so it’s just as easy to use Slang in a dynamic way, such as an in-game console.

Another feature in this version is the introduction of Scopes. A Scope is a simple data structure which contains statements and can be executed by the application. Currently, they are used for conditional statements.

if condition {
    print "true!"
}

ifelse condition {
    print "true!"
} {
    print "false!"
}

In the future, they will also allow closures and script functions.

With the addition of Scopes, the use of semicolons as artificial separators is no longer necessary, and they have therefore been removed from the language keyword set.

With this release I’ve moved Slang out of FLAKit and into its own repository. You can follow it here.