Whow! Exactly 5 months ago I wrote about the next big things on my a2 project. One of these 5 things was switching its scripting language Autohotkey to the now officially supported version 2, deprecating the old 1.1 version that a2 scripts were based on so far.
Well, I kind of suggested doing this of the 5 right away and yeah, that's what this post is about :]
So I jumped into it, swapped the Autohotkey.exe to the new version, tried to run it and fixed it piece by piece until it no longer complained. There are now ahk2 branches for a2, a2.modules and a2.modlab amounting 145 commits (code submissions) ahead of their main branches as of now.
That bulk of work was actually quite fun! I didn't have such a surge of productivity on the project for long! It was rather dull work but it felt super rewarding. Heaps of low hanging fruit harvest! Quickly I knew about what makes it tick now and how things need to be done now and I gotta say: This is a different beast than Python 2/3 conversion! (Which is another topic on it's own. Just so much: We're maintaining a whole big ass library running on Python 2 and 3 all time at the company and it's totally doable!) As for Autohotkey though, no can do! I guess there might be very simple Autohotkey scripts that can run both on 1.1 and 2.0 but generally the changes are rather substantial and I'm sure we'll see why.
tbd: I'll go through some of the commits and list the most offenders that I encountered myself. The actual documentation "Changes from v1.1 to v2.0" is (according to WordCount) 24318 words, 141258 characters and 1803 lines long!! (I didn't read it all. Only what I needed)
- The comma after
CommandName,is gone. For these there needs to be a space now between the first argument. But ALL can also be written like functions! - assignments as well as default arguments need the walrus operator
:=before it could be both! byrefis now&and much more explicit so you cannot pass a string when a reference is expected. I mean yeah, duh! But that was possible before!!!- Strings are always in quotes and mix of
'and"are valid! To write a single literal"now it's'"'and ... (I kid you not) no longer"""". You don't need percentage notation%varnam%for concatanation. my_array.Lengthis now a property and can no longer be called