HLL: Guiding Concept

[Chris Harris]

I've been thinking about what sort of guiding concepts we may want to use 
for our HLL.  It seems to me that while Mike's cells are great at the 
lower level, I'd much prefer something with concepts such as 
inheritance.  Therefore, I'd like to throw out the two ideas I know 
enough about to call promicing.

The first is a prototype and delegate object model, like that found in 
self.  There exist a number of objects, containing code and data, that 
completely describe their own workings.  (In other words, there's no such 
thing as a class.)  To put inheritance back in the scheme of things, each 
object has one or more delegates.  When an object gets a message it 
doesn't understand, it gets passed on to its delegate, which may in turn 
pass this to its delegate, etc. until we reach the top of the chain.  
This allows the creation of more flexible class hiarchies.  New objects 
are made by cloning existing ones and modifying them.

Perhaps more interesting/modern, but also more difficult to represent, is 
the pattern concept found in the BETA language.  Basically, everything in 
the language, be it a variable, a function, an object, a thread of 
control is a pattern.  All patterns may have parents and children, 
allowing you to set up a sort of inheritance.  Patterns are then a 
collection of other patterns that cn be invoked in different ways.  
Certain patterns may be forked into a new thread of execution.  I guess 
you should read the BETA faq if you really want to understand the "neat 
factor" behind this....  Its cool though.  =)

I don't really have time to be specific here, just throwing a few ideas 
out.  If anyone has any reasons why these should/shouldn't be used in our 
HLL, please throw them out....

-Chris

"If patterns of 1s and 0s were 'like' patterns of human lives and death,
if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer by a
long string of 1s and 0s, then what kind of creature would be represented
by a long string of lives and deaths?"  --Thomas Pynchon