Final classes
I added final classes, in the Java sense. Attempting to inherit from a final class raises an error. To declare a class as final, suffix the definition with "final", in the same manner that words can be declared "inline" or "foldable":
TUPLE: point x y z ; final
The motivation for final classes was not obvious. There are three main reasons I added this feature.
Unboxed tuple arrays used to have the caveat that if you store an instance of a subclass into a tuple array of a superclass, then the slots of the subclass would be "sliced off":
TUPLE: point-2d x y ;
TUPLE-ARRAY: point-2d
TUPLE: point-3d < point-2d z ;
SYMBOL: my-array
1my-array set
1 2 3 point-3d boa my-array get set-first
my-array get first .
=> T{ point-2d { x 1 } { y 2 } }
This warranted a paragraph in the documentation, and vigilance on the part of the programmer. Now, tuple arrays simply enforce that the element class is final, and if it is not, an error is raised. This removes a potential source of confusion; it is always nice when written warnings in the documentation can be replaced by language features.
Joe Groff's typed library has a similar problem. This library has a feature where input and output parameters which are read-only tuples are passed by value to improve performance. This could cause the same "slicing problem" as above. Now, typed only passes final read-only tuples by value.
Finally, there was a previous mechanism for prohibiting subclassing, but it wasn't exposed as part of the syntax. It was used by the implementation of struct classes to prevent subclassing of structs. The struct class implementation now simply declares struct classes as final.
Typed words can now be declared foldable and flushable
Factor has a pretty unique feature; the user can declare words foldable (which makes them eligible for constant folding at compile time if the inputs are all literal) or flushable (which makes them eligible for dead code elimination if the output results are not used). These declarations now work with typed words.
Platform-specific vocabularies
I added a facility to declare what operating systems a vocabulary runs on. Loading a vocabulary on an unsupported platform raises an error, with a restart if you know what you're doing. The load-all word skips vocabularies which are not supported by the current platform.
If a platforms.txt file exists in the vocabulary's directory, this file is interpreted as a newline-separated list of operating system names from the system vocabulary. This complements the existing vocabulary metadata for authors, tags, and summary.
This feature helps the build farm avoid loading code for the wrong platform. It used to be that vocabularies with the "unportable" tag set would be skipped by load-all, however this was too coarse-grained. For example, both the curses and DirectX bindings were tagged as unportable, and so the build farm was not loading or testing them on any platform. However, curses is available on Unix systems, and DirectX is available on Windows systems. With the new approach, there is a extra/curses/platforms.txt file listing unix as a supported platform, and the various DirectX vocabulary directories have platforms.txt files listing windows.
