Topic: Object orientation

Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote down a bullet list of what he thought actually made it possible for the Alan Kay team to create Smalltalk, and many other ground breaking things, at Xerox PARC in the 70s. Let’s take a look at his bullets one by one and see how it applies to Spry and my puny little effort around it :)

So… Ni has almost reached the point where I can see objects appearing. The following describes the design I currently have in mind, read it and tell me what you think so I can scrap it and start over ;)

So… my little Ni language got some attention since it was first on Hackernews, then TheRegister, all over Twitter and also Reddit.

This article describes some core parts of the current implementation of the Ni (now known as Spry) language. It’s not a tutorial, introduction or manual. It’s in fact kinda incoherent - but so is Ni :)

Ni is my own little language heavily influenced by Smalltalk but also other sources like Rebol, Forth, Lisp, Self and Nim. Ni is a bit strange, but it’s not academic and really meant to become something useful.

As I described in the earlier posts Nim didn’t support “super calls” when using methods instead of statically bound procs and generics. My article caused a little bit of discussion around this on IRC and Andreas decided to implement the mechanism he already had planned - but had not fully decided a good name for.

As I described in the earlier posts Nim didn’t support “super calls” when using methods instead of statically bound procs and generics. My article caused a little bit of discussion around this on IRC and Andreas decided to implement the mechanism he already had planned - but had not fully decided a good name for.

In the previous article when I explored OO mechanisms in Nim I felt I dropped the ball a bit in my Fruit example. This is a followup.

So previously in Nim and OO Part II we saw how we could solve the “super call” issue using only procs and generics in Nim. This means that all code is statically bound.

Nim is presented as an imperative language. And yes, it has some of its roots in the Pascal line of languages, but it also has a set of powerful abstraction mechanisms making it very suitable for object oriented programming. And when I write “object oriented” I am referring to a broader flexible sense of OO in which objects can be formulated with attached behavior, polymorphism between different objects, some kind of reuse model of code (inheritance etc) and some type of dynamic dispatch.