Algosim documentation: What is new in Algosim 3.2?

What is new in Algosim 3.2?

April 2025

Major changes

Algosim 3.2 has a completely redesigned IDE with a fully customizable panel-based layout. The current layout can be queried and changed programmatically, and layout presets can be specified using an XML-based file format. Moreover, the IDE now supports state-of-the-art per-monitor DPI scaling on the Windows desktop.

Algosim 3.2 also introduces support for plotting implicit equations in Cartesian coordinates and level curves (contours) of two-dimensional scalar fields.

In addition, a large number of improvements have been made in kernel functions and front-end facilities.

Language changes

The only core language change is that the tokeniser now accepts the ASCII colon-equals sequence as a substitute for the proper operator. In previous versions of Algosim, a common user mistake was to write

a:=5

only to be greeted with the

syntax error
Operand missing before operator = at column 3.

message. The user should have written

a ≔ 5

(or only a≔5, but with the spaces the := ASCII sequence would have been automatically replaced with the proper ≔ operator).

In Algosim 3.2, the tokeniser is more forgiving and understands that the := ASCII sequence means ≔. (Of course, the ASCII sequence := is not replaced within string literals or comments. Only those cases that would have resulted in syntax errors in Algosim 3.1 and earlier are reinterpreted. This more forgiving behaviour is possible because the operators : and = are binary infix operators and so cannot be placed next to each other.)

New functions

Significantly extended functions

Other changes

See also