New feature alert! Whereas before you could only declare constants in your state, now you can declare variables!

These variables are only available for the state (or most likely, scope, due to how I’ve implemented it but I haven’t tested it at the moment), and get reset when going through it again. This means they are volatile: you can’t store state from one frame to another, and you also can’t reference them from the outside.

For the technical detail, it’s a per-entity memory stack that doesn’t get saved or rolled back. It has no upper limit, but it might need to reallocate. It starts at a reasonable size so it probably won’t come up unless you push it explicitely. Its volatility allows it to not bog down the implementation, as it gets “reset” every time you try to execute CASC code.

While it might not sound like a huge thing in the context of the previous versions, it actually enables a lot of future behavior. If you looked at the Base CASP I already used a proxy for them using the RegA/B/C/D variables you might have seen at times. They are usually used in intermediary computations. One such example that I’ll need to convert is F branches, which use it to handle modulos.

The main usefulness however is coming soon: using State Calls as functions, with their own local variables. Previous versions of this were limited and hard to parse, but this time it will be much clearer and integrated. Another benefit that is already in, is shorter compilation times: helpers don’t get compiled anymore so it removes like 80%+ of states. Unsure how needed that was since the compiler is in a compiled language now, but we’ll see when it gets to a higher level. This will be tricky to implement, but I’ve got a fairly clear idea of how I want to do it.