Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!warwick!expya!jtr From: jtr@cs.exeter.ac.uk (Jason Trenouth) Newsgroups: comp.object Subject: Re: object-oriented this, that, and the other thing Message-ID: Date: 24 Nov 89 20:20:42 GMT References: <1471@aber-cs.UUCP> <1597@novavax.UUCP> Sender: news@cs.exeter.ac.uk Organization: Computer Science Dept. - University of Exeter. UK Lines: 37 In-reply-to: weiner@novavax.UUCP's message of 7 Nov 89 04:34:51 GMT >>>>> On 7 Nov 89 04:34:51 GMT, weiner@novavax.UUCP (Bob Weiner) said: Bob> I would like to commend to anybody's attention BETA . . . Bob> Could anyone provide a short summary of BETA and its key innovations Bob> over other OOPLs? An description of BETA appears in: @InCollection{kristensen:beta, author = "B. B. Kristensen and O. L. Madsen and B. Moller-Pederson and K. Nygaard", title = "The {Beta} Programming Language", booktitle = "Research directions in object oriented programming", publisher = "MIT Press", year = "1987", editor = "B. Shriver and P. Wegner", } Its claim to fame is that it supports many diverse programming constructs with one underlying abstraction mechanism. Procedures, functions, data-types, classes, objects, etc are all implemented via something they call a _pattern_. Control and data structures are both defined using the same syntax. Very appealing idea and it might be a great boon to teaching programming. They also have something to say on the subject of concurrency. Borrowing a term from the other discussion, I believe that its a _non-orthogonal_ language. Hopefully someone who knows more about Beta will have posted by the time this reaches the net, but just in case! JT -- ______________________________________________________________________________ | Jason Trenouth, | JANET: jtr@uk.ac.exeter.cs | | Comp. Sci. Dept., Exeter Univ., | UUCP: jtr@expya.uucp | | Devon, EX4 4PT, UK. TEL: (0392) 264061 | BITNET: jtr%uk.ac.exeter.cs@ukacrl|