Overview of the BETA Programming Language - Abstract

Ole Lehrmann Madsen
Computer Science Department, Aarhus University
Ny Munkegade, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
Phone: +45 86 12 71 88
E-mail: olmadsen@cs.au.dk

Abstract

BETA is a modern object-oriented language from the Scandinavian school of object-orientation where the first object-oriented language Simula [DMN70] was developed. BETA supports the object-oriented perspective on programming and contains comprehensive facilities for procedural and functional programming. BETA has powerful abstraction mechanisms for supporting identification of objects, classification and composition. BETA is a strongly typed language like Simula, Eiffel [Mey88] and C++ [Str86a], with most type checking being carried out at compiletime. It is well known that it is not possible to obtain all type checking at compile time without sacrificing the expressiveness of the language. BETA has an optimum balance between compiletime type checking and runtime type checking.

This paper is a chapter in Object-Oriented Environments - The Mjølner Approach


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