19. Future Directions

Several new features or enhancements to the S-Lang language are planned for the next major release. In no particular order, these include:

• An interactive debugging facility.
• Function qualifiers. These entities should already be familiar to VMS users or to those who are familiar with the IDL language. Basically, a qualifier is an optional argument that is passed to a function, e.g., plot(X,Y,/logx). Here /logx is a qualifier that specifies that the plot function should use a log scale for x.
• File local variables and functions. A file local variable or function is an object that is global to the file that defines it.
• Multi-threading. Currently the language does not support multiple threads.