BETA

BETA is a pure object-oriented language from the Scandinavian School in System Development where the first object-oriented language Simula programming language was developed.

From a technical perspective, BETA provides the following unique feature:

Classes and Procedures are unified to one concept, a BETA pattern.

Classes are defined as properties/attributes of objects. This means that a class cannot be instantiated without an explicit object context.

A consequence of the above is that BETA supports nested classes; and BETA s nested classes are indeed one of the primary sources of inspiration for Java programming language s so-called inner classes.

Classes can be virtually defined (much like virtual methods can in most other object-oriented programming languages).

Virtual entities (such as methods and classes) are never overwritten; instead they are refined or specialized.

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 programming language, Eiffel programming language and C plus plus, with most of the type checking being carried out at compile-time. It is well known that it is not possible to obtain complete type checking at compile-time without sacrificing the expressiveness of the language. BETA has an optimum balance between compile-time type checking and run-time type checking.

=External links=

*[http://daimi.au.dk/~beta/ The BETA Language] homepage *[http://www.daimi.au.dk/~eernst/gbeta/ gbeta] generalized BETA