Tea (programming language)

Tea is a high level scripting language for the Java environment. It combines features of Scheme, Tcl and Java.

Integrated support for all major programming paradigms.
- Functional programming language.
- Functions are first class objects.
- Scheme-like closures are intrinsic to the language.
- Support for object oriented programming.
Modular libraries with autoloading on demand facilities.
Large base of core functions and classes.
- String and list processing.
- Regular expressions.
- File and network I/O.
- Database access.
- XML processing.
100% Pure Java.
- The Tea interpreter is implemented in Java.
- Tea runs anywhere with a Java 1.1 JVM or higher.
Intended to be easily extended in Java. For example, Tea supports relational database access through JDBC, regular expressions through GNU Regexp, and an XML parser through a SAX parser (XML4J for example).

[edit] Interpreter Alternatives

Tea is a proprietary language. Its interpreter is subject to a non-free license. On the other hand, a project called "destea", which released Language::Tea in CPAN, provides an alternative to the proprietary interpreter, by generating Java Code based on the Tea code.
There's an open source compiler, TeaClipse, that uses a JavaCC-generated parser to parse and then compile Tea source to the proprietary Tea bytecode. The author of TeaClipse has expressed interest in enhancing TeaClipse to produce Java bytecode.