Paul_Abrahams%Wayne-MTS@UM.CC.UMICH.EDU (04/10/90)
In answer to a recent inquiry in this forum, here's the abstract of the talk that I've been giving on SPLASH. My apologies if you've received this twice; I thought I transmitted it once before but I never got a copy back. Many of the ideas in SPLASH are derived from Icon. The main differences are that SPLASH is strongly typed and that it is designed to be compiled rather than interpreted. (That helps in providing operator overloading - a recent topic of discussion in this forum.) I'll be happy to answer any questions about SPLASH either by email or otherwise. ================================================================== SPLASH: A Systems Programming Language for Software Hackers SPLASH is a programming language for programmers who delight in their tools. SPLASH supports programming at a high level of expression, yet it enables its user to understand how the code he writes is really executed and to maintain precise control, where it is wanted, over what the computer is actually doing. Its high-level facilities include the ability to define container types and iterators; generators that provide most of the facilities of coroutines but at far less cost; tuple types; inheritance of operations and polymorphism in the object-oriented style; and a great many syntactic niceties that encourage elegance and transparency of expression. Although the ideas in SPLASH are not radically new, they are combined and integrated in a new way. Major sources of inspiration for SPLASH are Icon, C++, and SEDL, a Software Engineering Design Language developed at IBM that is an extension of Ada. Although SPLASH has not yet been implemented, the ideas in it are of interest independently of any particular implementation. The talk will describe the features of SPLASH and give some examples of its use. Paul Abrahams 214 River Road Deerfield MA 01342 (413) 774-5500 Abrahams%wayne-mts@um.cc.umich.edu