The Compat package is designed to ease interoperability between older and newer versions of the Julia language. In particular, in cases where it is impossible to write code that works with both the latest Julia master branch and older Julia versions, or impossible to write code that doesn't generate a deprecation warning in some Julia version, the Compat package provides a macro that lets you use the latest syntax in a backwards-compatible way.

This is primarily intended for use by other Julia packages, where it is important to maintain cross-version compatibility.

To use Compat in your Julia package, add a line Compat to the REQUIRE file in your package directory. Then, in your package, after a using Compat statement to load Compat, simply use:

@compat ...Julia master syntax...

wherever you want to use syntax that differs in the latest Julia master (the development version of Julia).

Currently, the @compat macro supports the following syntaxes:

• @compat Dict(foo => bar, baz => qux) - type-inferred Dict construction.

• @compat Dict{Foo,Bar}(foo => bar, baz => qux) - type-declared Dict construction.

• @compat split(str, splitter; keywords...) - the Julia 0.4-style keyword-based split function

• typealias AbstractString String - String has been renamed to AbstractString #8872