IC Mondays seminars - Down with Imports: Modules as Objects in Newspeak
Event details
| Date | 03.05.2010 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Dr. Gilad Bracha, Independent consultant |
| Location |
INM 202
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Modularity constructs in programming languages are usually second class entities based on abstract data types. They cannot be stored in variables, passed as parameters, manipulated in computations or defined in a mutually recursive manner. Module declarations are typically linked via import statements making them inherently dependent on other declarations.
We address these weaknesses in Newspeak, a new programming language in the tradition of Self and Smalltalk. Newspeak has no global namespace and no static state. Classes are objects, and class declarations can nest arbitrarily, allowing top level classes to act as module definitions. All names in Newspeak are late bound, including class names. Consequently, all classes are virtual, and all classes define mixins, allowing for class hierarchy inheritance. Newspeak has been used to define its own IDE and a complete GUI stack, as well as applications and general purpose libraries. In this talk, I'll explain how Newspeak modularity works and discuss our experience with it.
Biography
Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language. Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- G.Rochat