Release notes

This page contains release notes of notable changes in Pine Script v3.

October 2019

• plotchar function now supports most of the Unicode symbols:

• New bordercolor argument of the plotcandle function allows you to change the color of candles’ borders:

September 2019

Some fixes were made:

• fill function now works correctly with na as the color parameter value
• sign function now calculates correctly for literals and constants

July-August 2019

New variables added:

• isseconds returns true when current resolution is in seconds
• isminutes returns true when current resolution is in minutes

The behavior of some functions and variables has changed:

• The time variable returns the correct open time of the bar for more special cases than before
• An optional seconds parameter of the timestamp function allows you to set the time to within seconds
• security function:

  • Added the possibility of requesting resolutions in seconds:

    1, 5, 15, 30 seconds (chart resolution should be less than or equal to the requested resolution)

  • Reduced the maximum value that can be requested in some of the other resolutions:

    from 1 to 1440 minutes

    from 1 to 365 days

    from 1 to 52 weeks

    from 1 to 12 months

17 May 2017

Added compile-time constants. Pine Script used to have 3 types of constants - literal, non-literal and serial. Now there’s one more, but let’s look at existing ones first.

Some functions (input, color) can only accept literals as certain arguments. We realized that it could be more convenient, so we added a new type of constants that can be calculated during compilation. In addition to literals, they include mathematical expressions that use other literals and constants.

Any type of Pine Script literal (integer, float, boolean, string) is the most specific type while the serial type is the most general one. The compilation-time constants take a spot between the literal and non-literal types. All of the functions that accepted literal as an argument will now accept compilation-time constants as well.

26 Apr 2017

Added string input withoptions. Some built-in indicators have a setting that lets you choose several options. The same is possible in Pine Script now. For example:

17 Apr 2017

Added kwargs syntax for all built-in functions. Pinescript had different calls for annotation functions (study, plot, …) and built-in functions (sma, security, …). Annotation functions used to accept keyword arguments while built-in functions didn’t.

You are now able to call all built-in functions using keyword arguments. This will be especially useful for the security function to specify the lookahead argument but skip the gaps argument:

20 Mar 2017

Repainting and backtesting issues have been reported for some time. These issues are not identical, but they are interrelated. Version 3 aims to solve the backtesting issue. Here’s a more detailed explanation.

Repainting issue

There’s a substantial difference between historical and real-time data that a Pine Script indicator or strategy uses. The key difference - a historical bar does NOT contain information about price movements between high and low of a bar. Only a few Pine Script language tools are sensitive to this difference, read more Indicator repainting.

Here is a basic example that describes this case:

The above script is based on historical data and always returns na. It can be plotted only on the last bar of both historical and real-time data. After each chart reload (after pressing F5) the border that divides historical data and real-time will be shifted, in accordance with the current time period.

Backtesting issue

The second issue is a security function that allows you to get “future” data while doing calculations using historical data. For example: security(tickerid, "D", high) on historical data will show the daily high price on the first hourly bar of the whole day. This can be used to create an incorrect backtesting strategy:

However, we believe that this type of behavior of the security function could be useful when it’s being used in indicators. For instance, ChrisMoody uses this effect in a popular indicator called CM_Pivot Points_M-W-D-4H-1H_Filtered (over 3000 likes) that is used to create pivot lines. Some other examples --- Open Close Daily Line, Time Frame Superimpose, as well as the Get Satisfaction comment. We decided that the old behavior will remain available only when it’s explicitly indicated.

By default, in Pine Script version 3, security function will NOT return future data (in contrast to version 2). We also added a new parameter lookahead with two values: barmerge.lookahead_off and barmerge.lookahead_on to switch between the new and old behavior of the security function. Detailed description of this parameter can be found in the section barmerge_gaps_and_lookahead.

Other changes

• Self-referenced and forward-referenced variables are removed.
• Math operations with booleans are forbidden.

See Pine version 3 migration guide for more details.

Pine version 2

• Variable assignment (or mutable variables),
• if_statement,
• for_statement,