lyng/docs/OOP.md

OO implementation in Ling

Basic principles:

• Everything is an instance of some class
• Every class except Obj has at least one parent
• Obj has no parents and is the root of the hierarchy
• instance has member fields and member functions
• Every class has hclass members and class functions, or companion ones, are these of the base class.
• every class has type which is an instances of ObjClass
• ObjClass sole parent is Obj
• ObjClass contains code for instance methods, class fields, hierarchy information.
• Class information is also scoped.
• We acoid imported classes duplication using packages and import caching, so the same imported module is the same object in all its classes.

Instances

Result of executing of any expression or statement in the Ling is the object that inherits Obj, but is not Obj. For example it could be Int, void, null, real, string, bool, etc.

This means whatever expression returns or the variable holds, is the first-class object, no differenes. For example:

1.67.roundToInt()
1>>> 2

Here, instance method of the real object, created from literal 1.67 is called.

Instance class

Everything can be classified, and classes could be tested for equivalence:

3.14::class
1>>> Real

Class is the object, naturally, with class:

3.14::class::class
1>>> Class

Classes can be compared:

assert(1.21::class == Math.PI::class)
assert(3.14::class != 1::class)
assert(π::class == Real)
π::class
>>> Real

Note Real class: it is global variable for Real class; there are such class instances for all built-in types:

assert("Hello"::class == String)
assert(1970::class == Int)
assert(true::class == Bool)
assert('$'::class == Char)
>>> void

More complex is singleton classes, because you don't need to compare their class instances and generally don't need them at all, these are normally just Obj:

null::class
>>> Obj

At this time, Obj can't be accessed as a class.

Methods in-depth

Regular methods are called on instances as usual instance.method(). The method resolution order is

1. this instance methods;
2. parents method: no guarantee but we enumerate parents in order of appearance;
3. possible extension methods (scoped)