The demo version of the software is now running 1.3. While BARfly still has most of these features hidden from the user, the engine is a lot more powerful than it used to be. In particular:
1) BAR Navigational Strings (BNS) now officially supported
2) Bookmark stacks (Push and Pop for bookmarks) now officially supported
3) More advanced reading, writing, insertion, and deletion operations
4) Many new I.F. operators and built-in functions
5) Ability to insert and delete nodes from I.F. functions
6) Native callback functions from I.F. functions
7) More diverse auto-advancement options for reading, writing, insertion, and deletion operations
BAR developers can take advantage of many new programming features, like scripts that can insert and delete nodes, more “STDLIB.H-type functions” like atof, atol, stricmp, and strtok, and more optimized compiled opcode execution.
Why does BARfly not look different? For a simple reason: most of these updates would only give you a few more function-call choices when you press F8. The real power lies in the type of implementation files you can create now!
Right on the heels of this update will come two even more important updates:
1) DecideChoice: a new method for large decision lists, which picks a choice using a numerical index rather than evaluating each individual list choice.
2) Unorganized block “regular expression” definitions: the ability to build text blocks using EBNF notation (like W3C uses to describe XML). This will enhance BAR, allowing it to perform high-quality text-parsing operations with ease!
Related to that last point, should BAR be changed to BATAR, or “Binary AND Text Artifact Reference?” Well, not really. Text is really a subset of binary, so it’s still fair to call it BAR.