## Parable 2016.03: Changes to Allegory Allegory is seeing some significant changes in the next release of Parable. So what's coming / changing? *Faster startups*: Allegory now initializes from a precompiled snapshot instead of embedding the source and compiling on start. This significantly cuts down the initial load time. *Goodbye default.j and snapshots*: Allegory had two functions for saving and reloading snapshots: **save-snapshot** and **reload-snapshot**. These have been removed. Additionally, it used to look for a *~/.parable/default.j* to initialize from. This is no longer supported. *Hello turnkey*: in place of the snapshots, Allegory now allows for generation of *turnkey* executables. These replace the stored snapshot with a new one, containing what would have previously been in the standalone snapshots. These also allow leveraging a couple of hooks for standalone scripts. Example of this: [ 'Hello, World!\n' display bye ] 'allegory.on-start' : 'hello' save-as bye This creates a new *hello* script that runs the code in **allegory.on-start**. *Simplfied command line arguments*: The older functions for obtaining command line arguments are being depreciated. It's now possible to get the argument list as an array and use the standard words for dealing with this. I'll be reimplementing the older functions using the array based access, and expect to remove them in a future release. *Libraries*: With the addition of vocabularies in the core Parable language, Allegory will be supporting loading *libraries* corresponding to them. I'm still doing some work on this, but you'll be able to do something like: 'Tables~' need [ 'Tables~' 'Stack~' ] needs Allegory won't load a vocabulary that's already present. Libraries will be in one of two places: *~/.parable/library* or *./library*. At present this is only partially implemented, but should be fully in place within the week. *Vocabularies*: some of the Allegory functionaity will be wrapped into vocabularies. This is ongoing, but there'll at least be vocabularies for all I/O related functionality.