Informal Introduction

[Brian T. Rice]

Welcome to the Slate mailing list!

This project will define, implement, and develop a language that provides
the features of Self and Beta under a unified object-oriented language,
called Slate.

As you all know, the project's current documentation is at:
http://www.tunes.org/~water/slate-home.html

This is my own section of the tunes.org website, but it should be moved as
soon as the specification has stabilized and our implementation is
presentable.

My goals for the language include everything that is already posted to the
pages there, but there are still many issues to address which I have no
preference on. For the most part, I favor the Self philosophy of keeping
the language features as simple as possible, but I would also throw in
orthogonality. In other words, the language features should be chosen to
avoid redundant features or even contradictory features.

The mailing list discussion is publicly archived, and mailing list topic
format should make browsing this archive as clear as possible.

Any software produced by the project is covered by the GNU General Public
License, unless we find it necessary to create a product under a different
license. I have no political issues with how the language is used: I am
ambivalent to issues of licensing.

At any rate, some of you I am quite familiar with, while others I have only
recently met. This project works in the close vicinity of Tunes
(in-)activity, but I'd like to keep the issues separate as much as
possible. I'd also like to hear your ideas about what you'd like from the
language, as far as differences from what the web site docs propose.

I'd like the first discussions to help flesh out the language
specification, so that it will be as straightforward as possible to write
up an implementation of it. The current code is simply a prototype of basic
language ideas, and is hardly complete.

Finally, the "Slate" name itself has a potential clash with Microsoft's
Slate web service, but I don't see there being any major conflict for quite
a while. Also, feel free to make liberal puns on the name. I'm certainly
not above a little humour. :)

Thanks for your interest,
	Brian