LavaPE 0.8.4

LavaPE is a programming environment for the experimental object-oriented programming language Lava. It replaces text editing with structure editing, thereby preventing all syntactic and many semantic errors.
The pure point-and-click nature of Lava programming and the concise representation of programs as declaration trees with small chunks of executable code simplify programming, and ease comprehension.
The new Lava language attempts to combine the advantages of either, and also to propose solutions to a number of fundamental problems that are hard to solve and that have been more or less ignored therefore by other languages so far.
Clearly this cannot be achieved by essentially combining individual features of Java and Visual Basic and by adding further features. A completely new language had to be developed from scratch.
Lava attempts to overcome the "ancient" programming technology that is based on text editors and that requires detailed knowledge and meticulous observation of the syntactic rules of the respective language.
Structure editing has many advantages over text editing and has the potential to considerably increase the programmers productivity.
The conceptual framework of object-orientation can still be improved considerably in several respects:
- Interfaces and implementations should be strictly separated. (Remember Modula-2 and Ada!)
- Two categories of objects, state and value objects, should be distinguished.
- A unified view of object- and component-orientation should be provided.
- "Genericity" and design patterns should be supported properly.
- The necessity of "type-casts" should be overcome.
The general conceptual framework of programming languages calls for additional improvements:
- The data flow of programs can be clarified by "single-assignment" just as the control flow has been clarified by abandoning "go to".
- We need an application-level pointer notion to distinguish "constituents" and "acquaintances" of objects.
- "Embedded SQL" should be finally replaced by seamlessly integrated expressive means for database access,
- Multi-threading, transactions, and synchronization should be treated in a purely declarative way.
- Programming languages should become "organization-aware" and "security-aware".
Enhancements:
- We have completely rewritten the Lava "callback" support, roughly after the model of the "signal/slot" concept of TrollTechs Qt. This is a first step towards an extended Lava GUI builder that will support also mainframe windows, menus, toolbars and callbacks.
- Lava is more portable now. It can be built on the Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris (sparc station and x86, g++), and Mac OS X.2 platforms. It has been tested, so far, on Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD. Please tell us if it runs also on the other platforms (and also if not).
- You can now benefit from "precompiled headers" if you use the g++ compiler (g++ release 3.4 or higher).
- For the Windows platform we have migrated to the NullSoft Install System (NSIS).
- We have added a method "zombifyRec" (zombify recursively) to class "Object" as a further aid for deactivating whole collections of objects containing circular forward references.