This section covers some of the important changes for users upgrading from Babel 1.0 to Babel 1.4. Users who are new to Babel 1.4 should skip this chapter because it gets into details that only experienced Babel users will understand.
There are two major changes for users upgrading. The first involves renaming certain splicer blocks in the C and C++ bindings, and the second involves the extra comments needed for the CCA’s Bocca IDE. Both these changes require new command line options.
Some splicer blocks have been renamed from what they were in Babel 1.0. The _misc and _includes in a C or C++ implementation header file have been renamed to _hmisc and _hincludes. The goal of this change has to give each splicer block a unique name across the implementation header and implementation source files. In Babel 1.0, the header and source both have a splicer blocks named _misc and _includes. This made things confusing for Bocca users.
To help users upgrading from Babel 1.0 to 1.4, Babel 1.4 has a --rename-splicers command line option that will automatically rename the header splicer blocks whose names have changed. Once you’ve generated new implementation header files, you do not need to keep using --rename-splicers.
To support CCA’s Bocca, Babel 1.0 introduced extra comments to guide the Bocca IDE to blocks of text that need to be edited. In Babel 1.4, you need to specifically request these extra comments with --cca-mode.