Object-Orientation FAQ

From: acourtny@cs.tcd.ie (Antony Courtney)
Subject: Announcing: Phantom language, home page, alpha release
Keywords: languages, distributed, interpreted
Organization: Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
Date: Mon, 15 May 1995 10:37:36 GMT

Announcing:

	Phantom, an Interpreted Language for Distributed Programming

This message is an announcement for the Phantom home page, mailing list,
and prototype interpreter for the centralised language core.

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From  the Phantom home page:

What is Phantom?

Phantom is a new interpreted language designed to address some of the problems
presented by large-scale, interactive, distributed applications such as
distributed conferencing systems, multi-player games, and collaborative work
tools. Phantom combines the distributed lexical scoping semantics of Obliq with
a substantial language core. The language core is based on a safe, extended
subset of Modula-3, and supports a number of modern programming features,
including:

   * static structural-equivalence typing
   * objects
   * modules and interfaces
   * lightweight threads
   * exceptions
   * garbage collection
   * higher-order functions and lambda expressions
   * a keyword binding mechanism
   * dynamically sized lists and slice indexing notation
   * type-safe implicit declarations

The Phantom interpreter is implemented entirely in ANSI C, and provides a
binding to the Tk GUI toolkit.

Phantom has similar goals to Java, but was developed independently.

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Information about Phantom, the mailing lists, differences from Java,
documentation on the language, and the current status and availability of
the interpreter can be found on the Phantom home page: