I actually did most of the work for this update last weekend, and I intended to make an update midway through the week once I finished one final thing (++ and -- operators, which still aren't done; more discussion on that some other post probably). Anyway, whatever... here's what I did get done.

While loops generate: We've got the most basic sort of loop, the while loop in place now.

Logical operators: You can now use !x, x && y, and x || y in your expressions. Handy!

Comparison translatons: Right after my last post, Overkill kindly pointed out that I was doing a direct translation for comparisions, which would not necessarily work. This is because of one fantastic gotcha in Lua: unlike most languages (which inherited the idea from C), 0 is not equal to False. In Lua, the only values that equate to False are false or nil. Contrast this to VergeC (and other C-likes), where you can expect things like 0, nil, empty strings, etc. etc to all be equal to false! So, internally we now have a table called VergeC.runtime, which contains lots of functions to do conversions for us. I'll also be sticking Verge library functions in there.

Miscellaneous: Updated what identifiers look like (previously it was just "any string of word characters", now it allows numbers and underscores and whatnot in the ways that you would expect a C-like language to). Changed the way it deals with scoping, and does actual checks on whether a referenced variable exists or not, and inspects where in the scope it is. Moved global variables into VergeC.bin along with all of the functions so we don't have to worry about trampling normal global scope (this was helped a lot by the new scoping stuff I built, since now globals and locals have to be referenced differently).

You can check out my current work-in-progress at https://github.com/speveril/VCLua.

Oh, and one more somewhat administrative type thing: I've re-enabled commenting. I've slipped a slightly stronger captcha type thing in there to try and prevent bot posting. If I start having problems with spam again then I'm going to go ahead and start using recaptcha or akismet or something.

Just noticed that my comments got hit by some spambots two days ago. I'll have to implement a captcha on the commenting thing when I've got some time, I guess. I was kind of hoping to avoid it, but I guess not! Ah well. Really, deep down in my heart of hearts I knew this would happen.

The site is switched over. There are possibly some lingering errors but things look all right. Contrary to what I said earlier, the RSS feeds should redirect such that you don't have to worry too much about changing your feed subscriptions.

This change happened because I finally decided that Drupal, which I was using before, was just too large and required me to worry about it too much. It also took up way more space than it needed to for what I was using it for. So, being a programming nerd, I decided to write my own... sort of.

I kept hearing about Django and, while I'm not the biggest fan of Python ever, the little bits I'd seen seemed quite nice. I decided that both as a professional development move and also to clean up my cluttered, bloated site, I would rewrite it to use Django instead. This is "sort of" writing it myself because Django is more of a framework to make it really easy to write your own stuff, rather than a full blown CMS that will take care of your kitchen sink for you, like Drupal.

Anyway I've been working on this off and on for the last little while and now it's done. While I was at it I started adding other bits and pieces into the site to make sure it wasn't hard. Ironically, now that I don't have a CMS to hold my hand all the way through adding a new page, it's kind of faster for me to do so.

Anyway, now that this change is out of the way, I need to stop procrastinating on getting back on board with Gruedorf, and posting other miscellaneous things that I have to talk about.

Just a quick note: This site will be going down and then coming back up in a different form later in the next couple of days. If you follow my RSS feed, it will be changing location as well. I'll try to stick up some sort of note so that you can track down the new feed without too much trouble.

Just enabled viewing of comments for everyone, and added a login/account creation thing to the menu. You can now respond to me when I ask leading questions, and you can make fun of me for only accomplishing "drew a chair" next week.

Right now it's all captcha-free and I'd prefer to leave it that way. If things get out of hand I'll look into adding one, though.