Newspeak is a new programming language in the Smalltalk/Self tradition. Like Self, Newspeak is message-based; all names are dynamically bound. However, Newspeak uses classes rather than prototypes. As in Beta, classes may nest. Because class names are late bound, all classes are virtual, every class can act as a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance falls out automatically. Top level classes are essentially self contained parametric namespaces, and serve to define component style modules, which naturally define sandboxes in an object-capability style. Newspeak was deliberately designed as a principled dynamically typed language. We plan to evolve the language to support pluggable types, but typechecking Newspeak programs is going to be challenging, which is good new for FOOL. I'll demonstrate the current version of Newspeak using our parser combinator library as an example, and discuss design issues and plans for the future.
Invited talk at FOOL 2008; Sunday, 13 January 2007; San Francisco, California, USA.