Announcing new scripting/prototyping language

[david.allison@comcast.net (Dave Allison)]

Oh no, not another "check out my cool new language" posting :-)

For about 5 years now, I have been developing a scripting/prototyping language
that is now available on the net.  It's called Aikido and was born in Sun Labs, but
has been released as open source.  I no longer work for Sun, but am continuing
to use and develop it.

The language has a syntax similar to C++ and Java but is aimed at adhoc and
prototyping tasks.  Unlike other scripting language, the idea of Aikido is to make
it easy for the programmer who is familiar with the C/C++/Java syntax
to pick it up and get started immediately.

The language is interpreted and has some interesting features:

* Dynamically typed, with large number of builtin types (string, vector, map, etc)
* Lexically scoped, a la Pascal, Ada, etc.
* Object oriented, single inheritance with packages, classes and interfaces
* Multithreaded, with Java and Ada style monitors
* Builtin stream operations
* Operator overloading
* enumerated types
* powerful string manipulation with regular expressions
* ability to call out to C functions with no additional interface code
* partial Java object model

It runs on Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X and is available from www.sun.com/coolstuff.
I will put it on Source Forge or Bitkeeper when I have a chance.

If you find yourself in need of a programming language that is easy to use
and readable, please have a look at it.

Cheers,

Dave