[Grace-core] Minutes of Teleconference 2011.12.7-8

[James Noble]

We talked about 

* the inheritance question 
   - we confirmed the rhs of an inherits clause  "definitely statically" resolves to an object constructor call or a correct request for a class's new method.
       this allows inheritance from objects, or from "class encodings" as well as classes.
  - as part of this discussion, we changed the generic class syntax so generic classes created by writing e.g.:  Foo.new<T>
      this simplifies the "object encoding" of generic classes - as only a generic method is required.

class CatFactory<T> {
     aColour : T, aName : String ->
        def colour : T := aColour
        def name : String := aName
        var miceEaten := 0
}

rewrites to

> def CatFactory = object { 
> method new<T>(aColour: T, aName: String) -> Cat<T>
>                         where T <: Colour 
>     {return object  { // the cat herself, now generic
>         def colour : T := aColour
>         def name : String := aName
>         var miceEaten := 0
>     }
>  }
> }

 -  (Kim can see the rationale & has gone along with this, but would still prefer a syntax that paralleled types  (e.g. new Foo<T> or Foo<T>.new)

 
* the module system 
       james is editing a draft email and will send soon.  main idea is that modules are reified as objects. 

other ongoing things
* James should be fixing the parser combinator-based grammar
* Kim will write type & etc rules 
* Michael is working on pattern matching 
* Tim is working on a minigrace port to Java

J
next meeting: wed 14 Dec 3pm Pacific, thurs 15 Dec noon NZ