[Grace-core] Minutes of Teleconference 2012.01.10-11

[Kim Bruce]

I'm rethinking my position on the syntax for class constructs.  The current proposal is 

class CountingStackClass.new<T>(size : Number, bottom : Number) -> CountingStack<T> {
inherits StackClass.new<T>(bottom) 
     // permitted via "definitively static" 
var count:= 0;
override method push ...
...

I'd rather see 

class CountingStackClass<T>(size : Number, bottom : Number) -> CountingStack<T>
inherits StackClass<T>(bottom) {
     // permitted via "definitively static"
var count:= 0;
override method push ...
}

Advantages:
1.  Threw away two noisy occurrences of “.new”.
2.   Putting “inherits StackClass” outside of  curly brackets is more similar to type constructions:
             type ExtType = SomeType & {m(T) -> U, …}
3.   Resulting syntax is closer to existing languages (but we would still use CountingStackClass.new<T>(args) to call the constructor and the translation to objects would be exactly the same).

James called a minor variant of this "encoding classes as methods" (with a different encoding), but I don't see the need for that.

Kim