From 8a94b49aab6f7802b80f65592c27189377607cc0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: schinz <schinz@epfl.ch>
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 08:42:57 +0000
Subject: - removed obsolete files (which were renamed)

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-%% $Id$
-
-There are hundreds of programming languages in active use, and many more are
-being designed each year. It is therefore very hard to justify the development
-of yet another language. Nevertheless, this is what I attempt to do here. My
-argument rests on two claims:
-\begin{itemize}
-\item[] {\em Claim 1:} The raise in importance of web services and
-other distributed software is a fundamental paradigm
-shift in programming. It is comparable in scale to the shift 20 years ago
-from character-oriented to graphical user interfaces.
-\item[] {\em Claim 2:} That paradigm shift will provide demand
-for new programming languages, just as graphical user interfaces
-promoted the adoption of object-oriented languages.
-\end{itemize}
-To back up the first claim, one observes that web services and other
-distributed software increasingly tend to communicate using structured or
-semi-structured data. A typical example is the use of XML to describe data
-managed by applications as well as the messages between applications. This
-tends to affect the role of a program in a fundamental way. Previously,
-programs could be seen as objects that reacted to method calls and in turn
-called methods of other objects. Some of these method calls might originate
-from users while others might originate from other computers via remote
-invocations.  These method calls have simple unstructured parameters or object
-references as arguments.  Web services, on the other hand, communicate with
-each other by transmitting asynchronous messages that carry structured
-documents, usually in XML format. Programs then conceptually become {\em tree
-transformers} that consume incoming message documents and produce outgoing
-ones.
-
-To back up the second claim, one notes that today's object-oriented languages
-are not very good tools for analyzing and transforming the trees which
-conceptually model XML data. Because these trees usually contain data but no
-methods, they have to be decomposed and constructed from the ``outside'', that is
-from code which is external to the tree definition itself. In an
-object-oriented language, the ways of doing so are limited. The most common
-solution is to represent trees in a generic way, where all tree nodes are
-values of a common type.  This approach is used in DOM, for instance. It
-facilitates the implementation of generic traversal functions, but forces
-applications to operate on a very low conceptual level, which often loses
-important semantic distinctions that are present in the XML data. A
-semantically more precise alternative would be to use different internal types
-to model different kinds of nodes.  But then tree decompositions require the use
-of run-time type tests and type casts to adapt the treatment to the kind of
-node encountered. Such type tests and type casts are generally not considered
-good object-oriented style. They are rarely efficient, nor easy to use.  By
-contrast, tree transformation is the natural domain of functional
-languages. Their algebraic data types, pattern matching and higher-order
-functions make these languages ideal for the task. It's no wonder, then, that
-specialized languages for transforming XML data such as XSLT are
-functional.
-
-Web services can be constructed using such a transformation language
-together with some middleware framework such as Corba to handle
-distribution and an object-oriented language for the ``application
-logic''.  The downside of this approach is that the necessary amount
-of cross-language glue can make applications cumbersome to write,
-verify, and maintain.  Better productivity and trustworthiness is
-achievable using a single notation and conceptual framework that would
-express object-oriented, concurrent, as well as functional aspects of
-an application.  Hence, a case for so called ``multi-paradigm''
-languages can be made. But one needs to be careful not to simply
-replace cross-language glue by awkward interfaces between different
-paradigms within the language itself. The benefits of integration are
-realized fully only if the common language achieves a meaningful
-unification of concepts rather than being merely an agglutination of
-different programming paradigms.  This is what we try to achieve with
-Scala\footnote{Scala stands for ``Scalable Language''.}.
-
-Scala is both an an object-oriented and functional language.  It is a
-pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an
-object. Types and behavior of objects are described by
-classes. Classes can be composed using mixin composition.  Scala is
-designed to interact well with mainstream object-oriented languages,
-in particular Java and C\#.
-
-Scala is also a functional language in the sense that every function
-is a value. Nesting of function definitions and higher-order functions
-are naturally supported. Scala also supports a general notion of
-pattern matching which can model the algebraic types used in many
-functional languages. Furthermore, this notion of pattern matching
-naturally extends to the processing of XML data.
-
-The design of Scala is driven by the desire to unify object-oriented
-and functional elements. Here are three examples how this is achieved:
-\begin{itemize}
-\item
-Since every function is a value and every value is an object, it
-follows that every function in Scala is an object. Indeed, there is a
-root class for functions which is specialized in the Scala standard
-library to data structures such as arrays and hash tables.
-\item
-Data structures in many functional languages are defined using
-algebraic data types. They are decomposed using pattern matching.
-Object-oriented languages, on the other hand, describe data with class
-hierarchies. Algebraic data types are usually closed, in that the
-range of alternatives of a type is fixed when the type is defined.  By
-contrast, class hierarchies can be extended by adding new leaf
-classes.  Scala adopts the object-oriented class hierarchy scheme for
-data definitions, but allows pattern matching against values coming
-from a whole class hierarchy, not just values of a single type.
-This can express both closed and extensible data types, and also
-provides a convenient way to exploit run-time type information in
-cases where static typing is too restrictive.
-\item
-Module systems of functional languages such as SML or Caml excel in
-abstraction; they allow very precise control over visibility of names
-and types, including the ability to partially abstract over types.  By
-contrast, object-oriented languages excel in composition; they offer
-several composition mechanisms lacking in module systems, including
-inheritance and unlimited recursion between objects and classes.
-Scala unifies the notions of object and module, of module signature
-and interface, as well as of functor and class. This combines the
-abstraction facilities of functional module systems with the
-composition constructs of object-oriented languages. The unification
-is made possible by means of a new type system based on path-dependent
-types \cite{odersky-et-al:fool10}.
-\end{itemize}
-
-%The rest of this report is structured as follows. Chapters
-%\ref{sec:simple-examples} to \ref{sec:concurrency} give an informal overview of
-%Scala by means of a sequence of program examples.  The remaining
-%chapters contain the language definition. The definition is formulated
-%in prose but tries to be precise.
-
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