Fancy (programming language)
Paradigm | object-oriented | ||
---|---|---|---|
Designed by | Christopher Bertels | ||
Developer | Christopher Bertels | ||
First appeared | 2010 | ||
strong, dynamic | |||
OS | Unix-like (including Mac OS X and Linux) | ||
License | BSD license | ||
.fy, .fyc, .fancypack | |||
Website |
www | ||
|
Fancy is a pure object-oriented programming language that is heavily influenced by Smalltalk and Ruby. The language is currently under development as an open source project by Christopher Bertels.[1]
Development
The language has been in development since the beginning of 2010 and has changed from a C++-based interpreter to be running on Rubinius, a dynamic bytecode virtual machine and implementation for the Ruby programming language.[2] Thus Fancy supports seamless integration with Ruby and any Ruby libraries.
Language characteristics
Fancy is a dynamic programming language,[1] meaning that it will execute tasks at runtime that many languages would perform during compilation. Fancy is a garbage-collected language, like Java or Ruby.[3] The goals of Fancy as a programming language are to be easily understandable by programming beginners, and to perform well enough to be used as a scripting language in Unix environments.[4]
Fancy and Ruby
Fancy is implemented on top of Rubinius, the Ruby VM, and therefore integrates well with Ruby.[4] Since Fancy is built on Ruby objects, the authors decided to allow access to the original Ruby classes by using a different syntax.[5] For this reason, Fancy can be extended easily to use Ruby libraries, or any of the C-extensions that are native to Ruby. Recently, a Ruby Gem was released for automated installation of the language.[6]
Author
Christopher Bertels is a Computer Science and Philosophy student at the University of Osnabrück in Germany.[7] He has been working on the Fancy language for around a year, and has spoken about Fancy at the 2010 Ruby and Rails European conference[4] and the Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON.[8][9]
Features
- Class definitions that are also used as namespaces (via nested classes)
- Loop-, Iteration- & common Collection methods (including next/break)
- Closures (Blocks)
- A simple package management system, similar to RubyGems
- Simple pattern matching
- Easy reflection (as in Ruby)
- Literal support for Regular Expressions, Arrays, Tuples, Ranges, Hashes (Dictionaries), Blocks, Integers, Floats, Symbols, (Multiline) Strings and more
- Exception Handling
- Dynamically scoped variables (like Common Lisp)
- A bootstrapped (self-hosted, completely in Fancy written) compiler for generating Rubinius bytecode
- Easy integration with Ruby: Calling out to any Ruby libraries that run on Rubinius, including most C-extensions
Implementation
The implementation of the current release is a runtime using the Rubinius virtual machine, meaning that the language is running on the same platform as Ruby, and is accompanied by a self-hosted (bootstrapped compiler) that generated Rubinius bytecode. To allow more simple cross-platform development, nearly all of the standard library is written in Fancy itself.[10]
Examples
Description | Syntax |
---|---|
Simple print |
"hello world!" println |
Looped print 5 times |
5 times: { "hello world!" println } |
Calling methods |
var method1: param1 . method2 |
Calling Ruby methods |
var ruby_method1(param1) ruby_method2() |
Class Definitions |
class Person { read_write_slots: ['name, 'age, 'country] "Creates a new Person instance with the given name, age and country." p = Person new p name: name p age: age p country: country p } |
Nested classes |
class Outer { class Inner { class InnerMost { def football { "football" } } } } instance = Outer Inner InnerMost new instance football println |
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 ”About Fancy.” https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/wiki
- ↑ Christopher Bertels (2011-02-23). "Introduction to Fancy". Rubinius. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
- ↑ "Category:Fancy". Rosetta Code. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "RubyAndRails". Rubyandrails.eu. 2010-10-22. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
- ↑ /. "fancy/README.md at master · bakkdoor/fancy · GitHub". Github.com. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
- ↑ "fancy | RubyGems.org | your community gem host". RubyGems.org. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
- ↑ "About me – Adztec Independent - Blog". Adztec-independent.de. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
- ↑ “Emerging Languages Talk Slides” http://www.fancy-lang.org/blog/2010/07/emerging-languages-talk-slides/
- ↑ "Fancy: OSCON 2010, The O'Reilly Open Source Convention - O'Reilly Conferences, July 19 - 23, 2010, Portland, OR". Oscon.com. Retrieved 2013-07-08.
- ↑ /. "fancy/README.md at master · bakkdoor/fancy · GitHub". Github.com. Retrieved 2013-07-08.