> sorry, i gotta ask.. but what the heck is vala? what is it used for? > why have i never heard of it? etc..?
Can't tell you why you've never heard of it :-) but it is not a very well known language as far as I know, so it does not really surprise me. It is a language that closely resembles C#, but instead of targeting the MS platform it just translates code to C, which then in turn can be compiled for RISC OS (well, it worked for Hello World, which is actually still the only program I compiled on RISC OS). So you have an object oriented language (not the C++ way, which is not very nice at all, in my view). It supports things like: Interfaces Properties Signals Foreach Lambda expressions Type inference for local variables Generics Non-null types Assisted memory management Exception handling Type modules (Plugins) (just copy/pasted that from http://live.gnome.org/Vala) In addition to that it can interface to existing C libraries via socalled vapi-files which describe how the C-library interfaces with the object-oriented world of Vala. At work I nowadays program in C# and since I learned that, programming on RISC OS has seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. It is one thing to have a great big library with lots of functionality available (.NET), that is nice, but to me it became really tiresome to have to constantly think about allocating memory and freeing it, like you have to do in C or C++. Vala is doing that for you. No more pointers (well, you can, if you want to, but...). I really hope Vala will find a place within RISC OS programming. Cheers, Jan-Jaap ____________________________________________________________ GET FREE 5GB EMAIL - Check out spam free email with many cool features! Visit http://www.inbox.com/email to find out more! _______________________________________________ GCCSDK mailing list [email protected] Bugzilla: http://www.riscos.info/bugzilla/index.cgi List Info: http://www.riscos.info/mailman/listinfo/gcc Main Page: http://www.riscos.info/index.php/GCCSDK
