TADS 3 API Organization

The TADS 3 Application Program Interface (or "API," a term that refers collectively to the set of functions and methods that the system exposes in order to give programmers access to system functionality) is not simply a single set of native functions, as it was in TADS 2.  Instead, the TADS 3 API is organized into several packages of functions and methods. 

 

The names that TADS 3 uses for its intrinsic functions are different from the names of the corresponding functions from TADS 2.  Furthermore, many TADS 2 functions are now object methods in TADS 3.  Strings and lists in particular now behave like objects, so many of the former intrinsic functions that manipulate these types are now methods.

 

The following packages contain equivalents for most of the functions that TADS 2 provided:

 

 

In addition, TADS 3 offers several new packages of functionality with no equivalents in TADS 2: