Update
I did almost no work in the Eek spec in the last two months, but I hope to finish it this year anyway. I took almost the whole december off, so I should have enough time for that. The last time I wrote about generics, I underestimated the problem. Java has a huge generics FAQ for a reason. Eek needs either C++-like template methods or Java-like wildcards. I prefer Wildcard with a C++-like template syntax, but I don't know the details yet. However, my main challenge became bigger by the addition of generics: to create a coherent model for delegates. Delegates must support generics, as well as all features of methods like overloading and dynamic dispatching/multi-methods. It must be possible to create delegates either from a class's methods, or with a closure. And a method should only syntactic sugar for a property that contains a delegate. With some kind of circular dependency, because a property can have getters and setters methods, which are delegates themselves. It will take some time to sort this mess out, but then the rest should be easy.
written at 15:11. (0 Comments, Permalink)