Differences with NVelocity

#New Features

• New ANTLR based Parser. This parser is easier to update, and fixes a few oddities or the old parser (e.g. $() and $.foo are now parsed as text which help with JQuery support)
• Templates are compiled rather than interpreted - this results in faster execution time, although it does have a cost of a higher first time cost than NVelocity due to the time taken to compile & JIT the templates.
• Support for native dictionary syntax {key: value}
• Can use double quotes to escape a quote in a string literal, or interpolated string John''s coat', "foo "" bar"
• Interoprability with dynamic objects.
• Literal blocks #[[Text Within a literal block not parsed or executed, and output as is $foo $bar]]

#Known Incompatibilities

• #23 IronVelocity does not support comparing objects implementing IComparable using relational operators
• #21 Whitespace before #set() is not swallowed by IronVelocity
• #19 Escaping in IronVelocity is a simple escape character to escape a $ or # in text. In NVelocity, you escape an entire reference, which lead to some confusing semantics. For example \$foo.Bar() in NVelocity would have always evaluated $foo.Bar(), and then output the text $foo.Bar() if it evaluated to a non null value, otherwise \$foo.Bar(). In IronVelocity you simply escape the dollar so will always output $foo.Bar() never evaluating $foo.Bar()
• #11 Nvelocity allowed you to prefix arguments with # in certain places and still parse e.g. #set($z = #$x). This is a parser error in IronVelocity.
• Macros have limited support (Will accept pull requests)
• IronVelocity uses different types for Lists & Dictionaries. If code took a dependency on a concrete type (HybridDictionary or ArrayList), they may encounter problems. They should instead rely on the IList<object> and IDictionary<object,object>, or their read only variants.
• The Parse directive is not supported - the startup costs of IronVelocity are to high to allow for dynamic parsing. May revisit once #12 is implemented.
• NVelocity allowed you to call explicitly implemented interface members. IronVelocity does not allow this.
• IronVelocity Does not support comparing strings using comparison operators (less than, greater than etc.). Equality & Inequality remain supported (no plans to fix) (TODO: think this is a special case of #23, but need to check)