June 15, 2015

Version 0.10 released

Highlights of this release are the implementation of while loops and calling user-defined functions, potentially with arguments. Please also see the complete release notes below for a potential migration issue concerning code defined outside of functions/procedures.

Download this release from the download section.

New features

  • implemented support for calling user-defined functions (previously called procedures) from within user code, optionally passing arguments to them and retrieving their return value. As a consequence of this, every mention of “procedures” in the documentation has been replaced by “functions”, including the name of the “procedures” logging level which is now deprecated. Closes issue 152.
  • implemented while loops (closes issue 151).
  • added support for not storing some fields in the output file (closes issue 58).
  • added support for using the “inf” (infinite) constant.

Miscellaneous improvements

  • improved our error handling code to display the (part of the) line where the error occurred in more cases and to not strip the traceback (error.log) of some important information in the cases where the line was already displayed.

  • configured the bundle editor (Notepad++) to display some warning and error lines in red in the console log. Additionally, when the error message contains a filename and/or a line number (this is currently too rare unfortunately), it is now click-able (to jump directly at the file/line).

  • defining a process outside of a function has been deprecated because it is ambiguous. For example, this code will now trigger a warning and will be an error in a future version:

    entities:
    person:
        fields:
            agegroup: int
        processes:
            agegroup: 10 * trunc(age / 10)
simulation:
    processes:
        - person: [agegroup]

    It should be replaced by (or possibly moved into another existing function):

    entities:
    person:
        fields:
            agegroup: int
        processes:
            compute_agegroup:
                - agegroup: 10 * trunc(age / 10)
simulation:
    processes:
        - person: [compute_agegroup]

    If this construct was used to have a temporary field (ie the field was not declared in the fields section) accessible from several functions, like

    entities:
    person:
        processes:
            tempfield: 0

            func1:
                tempfield: count()

            func2:
                otherfield: tempfield + 1

    One should now declare that field with output: False instead.

    entities:
    person:
        fields:
            tempfield: {type: int, initialdata: False, output: False}

        processes:
            func1:
                tempfield: count()

            func2:
                otherfield: tempfield + 1

    This closes issue 124.

  • made bcolz optional (which is only useful for interpolating the dataset during import). Thanks to Mahdi Ben Jelloul (pull request 161).

  • allow simulations with no processes section (but an init section).

  • reworked a few sections of the documentation.

  • trying to set a value to an unknown variable in new/clone produces a warning instead of being silently ignored (or even crashing with –debug)

Fixes

  • fixed end-of-simulation stats when simulating 0 periods (closes issue 158).
  • allow overriding (detected) field types of period and id fields in import (closes issue 154).
  • fixed autodump (broken in 0.9). Note that it is currently incompatible with while loops and recursive (user-defined) functions.
Posted by Gaëtan de Menten
Tags: release