Section: Software

Pharo

Participants : Stéphane Ducasse [ correspondant ] , Marcus Denker, Adrian Lienhard [ Software Composition Group (University of Bern) ] .

See also the web page http://www.pharo-project.org/ .

The platform. Pharo is a new, slimmed down, implementation of Smalltalk that is free software. Pharo is based on the Squeak dialect of Smalltalk, but focuses to provide a platform for professional development both in industry and research.

Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free open-source Smalltalk environment. By providing a stable and small core system, excellent developer tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is a platform to build and deploy mission critical Smalltalk applications.

A first stable version, Pharo 1.0 , will be released by the end of 2009. In Parallel, development continues with the unstable development branch 1.1 which has seen already over 40 incremental releases as of mid November 2009.

Traits. Traits are a simple composition mechanism for structuring object-oriented programs. A Trait is essentially a parameterized set of methods; it serves as a behavioral building block for classes and is the primitive unit of code reuse. With Traits, classes are still organized in a single inheritance hierarchy, but they can make use of Traits to specify the incremental difference in behavior with respect to their superclasses. Traits have been implemented in several object-oriented programming languages including Perl, Scala, C#, Squeak, Visualworks and Fortress.