• Mark Evans (17/17) Mar 29 2003 Language home page at

Mark Evans <Mark_member pathlink.com> writes:

Language home page at
http://lampwww.epfl.ch/scala

These slides from CS professor Martin Odersky (co-developer of Pizza) are easy,
fun, and worthwhile reading.
http://lamp.epfl.ch/~odersky/scala/part1.ppt

His thesis is that functional and OO styles can be fused, not merely conjoined;
the result he terms 'compositional programming.'  I like his XML examples.

He incorrectly lumps Mozart/Oz into a Frankenstein multiparadigm language
family, members of which suffer grafted limbs attached in awkward ways.  Oz
explicitly disclaims such approaches.  The two languages are identical in this
regard.  For example he says that 'Scalability stems from a unification (rather
than addition) of features.'  Oz says the same:  '...the differences between
declarative & imperative models and concurrent & sequential models are very
small compared to what they have in common....one does not program with models
[paradigms] but with programming concepts and ways to combine them....The model
appears as a kind of epiphenomenon.'

Mark