Nexxi at Courage, my friend | ideas and vapour- Article category Design
In Braindump: closures I said: This is why I’m calling Nexxi a block-oriented language. The language is structured as expressions inside blocks, and all blocks are equal, regardless who is executing them. It should make no difference to the programmer whether the thing controlling the block is language-defined or user-defined — everything should work the same, [...]
. . . continued from Braindump: typing 1 Dynamic typing Sometimes, flexibility really is more important than either safety or speed. There are times when you want to be able to construct method calls on-the-fly, and do other funky stuff not possible with static typing and compile-time dispatch. Such abilities can be useful for creating language interpreters, for [...]
Except when it comes to the allocation and storage of data, variable typing is all about method dispatch — the language must, at some point, map every code-level method call to a compiled entry-point, or report an error. As discussed in Opening Comments, my intent is for Nexxi to be useful both interpreted and compiled, both for rapid prototyping [...]
So, I’ve been working on the design for Nexxi, in dribs and drabs, since December. It doesn’t feel coherent to me, yet, and there are some ideas currently in the design that I’m not even close to sure about. I think the best thing for me to do is to just write it [...]
As discussed elsewhere, Nexxi is a block-oriented language. By this I mean that the language defines it’s structure in terms of blocks that are passed to controller “functions” (we’ll call them block headers from now on) that then call the block appropriately. In standard Java/C++/C syntax, a block is enclosed in curly braces: { [...]
The first post is always the hardest, right? Well, this ain’t so bad. So, this is Nexxi, a programming language for the JVM. By way of background, I was involved in another JVM language project until late last year. It eventually became clear to me that that language was not going to be one I would [...]