New traits system

[Brian Rice]

Hello all,

Lee has spent part of yesterday and all of day working on a new 
semantics and arrangement for traits objects and the object-traits 
relation, which basically restricts the semantics of delegation to a 
manageable subset. Mainly the added benefit right now is the ability to 
compose multiple parents in a saner manner than strict multiple 
inheritance.

I'll gather all the information for a proper explanation tomorrow. For 
now, you just need to know that many changes are in CVS for 
bootstrapping this new system, and that new alpha images and VM sources 
have been uploaded with this bootstrap result.

The essential problem of traits objects having methods defined upon 
(and applicable to) them which cannot apply to them is not entirely 
resolved yet, so there still are a few cases where viewing traits 
objects in the REPL will have bugs. But the problems of overrides and 
multiple inheritance have much clearer solutions now, and none of this 
has an impact on existing user code.

Enjoy.

--
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/