Fields

The next step after adding local variables was to extend that concept along to actual fields in classes. Not the sexiest feature in the world, but as the language pushes towards doing stuff, pragmatism will win. Fields (hopefully) look and act like you'd expect - they look like local variables without the preceding colon, and initialize when the class is created. Let's look at the test code:

foo :> new Foo(x: int) {
  (this).test : int := 42 + x;
  (this) => int { this.test } 
}

entrypoint => void {
  print new Foo 5;     // 47
  :x:foo := new Foo 5;
  print x;             // still 47
  x.test = 5;
  print x;             // 5
} 

The only weird part is that (this) bit in there. Since fields can be phrases like everything else in the language, you need to specify where the owner of the field is fetched from. The initializers can pull from the constructor parameters, and from other fields - though there is a bug currently where the compiler may not order the dependencies of initializers properly.

Slightly weird, but nothing ground breaking. You have fields, you can read from them and you can write to them. Now to something a little more weird. I also added support for fields to interfaces. They don't have initializers, but otherwise use the same syntax. Let's look at an example:

Pirate :> pirate (x: string) :< has name {
  (this).name : string := x;
}

Doctor :> doctor (x: string) :< has name {
  (this).name : string := x;
}

has name :> interface {
  (this).name : string;
}

print name of (x: has name) => void {
  print x.name;
}

entrypoint => void {
  print name of doctor "?";
  print name of pirate "Bob"; 

}

Here the interface allows unified access to the fields of two otherwise distinct types. Under the hood, this works because while I've been using "field" to refer to fields, they are implemented similarly to properties. Each field has a getter and a setter function, so the interface simply requires they be implemented. In the example above, we're only using the getter, so could be changed to this and still work:

Pirate :> pirate (x: string) :< has name {
  (this).name : string := x;
}

Doctor :> doctor (x: string) :< has name {
  (this).name : string := x;
}

has name :> interface {
  (this).name => string;
}

print name of (x: has name) => void {
  print x.name;
}

entrypoint => void {
  print name of doctor "?";
  print name of pirate "Bob"; 
}

Next on the list is delegates. Once they're in, the language should be mostly done I think. It will have all of the big language things you need to do stuff, along with a pile of bugs and none of the library/interop things necessary for you to do interesting stuff. Hopefully, delegates will go quickly and I'll figure out some project that will push the pragmatism agenda.