Andromeda

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Revision as of 05:59, 2 December 2010 by Wangbot (talk | contribs) (added longer intro, cleaned up goals section, added design paradigm section, leaving language features section empty for now since big Andromeda update is due soon)
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Andromeda is an object-oriented, imperative scripting language that extends Blizzard's Galaxy language. It was designed to be an extension to Galaxy in the manner that vJASS was an extension to Warcraft III's JASS scripting language. Andromeda is implemented as a superset of Galaxy, meaning that all syntactically valid Galaxy code is also syntactically valid Andromeda code (the only exceptions are cases where the Galaxy code uses one of Andromeda's keywords). Moreover, Andromeda is compiled directly to Galaxy, allowing custom maps that use Andromeda to be played on Battle.net without the use of third-party mods.


Goals

Andromeda's main goals are to:

  • Maintain compatibility with native Galaxy code
  • Support object-oriented programming (OOP)
  • Support comprehensive and useful reporting of compile-time errors
  • Introduce common programming features absent from Galaxy
  • Reduce the need for unnecessary and boilerplate code
  • Produce optimized code in the target language when compiled
  • Provide simple and effective methods for code debugging

Design Paradigms

Andromeda is an object-oriented, procedural, and imperative scripting language with additional support for generic and (limited) reflexive programming. First and foremost, Andromeda adheres strictly to the tenets of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Procedural programming, while still supported, is included mainly for compatibility purposes with Galaxy. In Andromeda programming, an emphasis is placed on viewing the program as a collection of objects, each with its own state. Code is built around querying objects to determine their states and manipulating objects to change their states. This allows for the adoption or expansion of programming strategies such as:

  • Encapsulation
  • Modular Design (also known as Reusability)
  • Extensibility
  • Orthogonality

Language Features

Andromeda retains all of Galaxy's syntax features while adding new ones. Most of the new syntax is inspired by or directly borrowed from the Java programming language.

Source Code Structure

New Syntactical Features

Encapsulation

Classes

Polymorphism

Generics

Links

Libraries