Abstract

Is an open, more flexible programming environment just around the corner? In his keynote address at OOPSLA ’98 (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications), Sun Microsystems Fellow Guy L. Steele Jr. said, “From now on, a main goal in designing a language should be to plan for growth.” Functions, user-defined types, operator overloading, and generics (such as C++ templates) are no longer enough: tomorrow’s languages must allow programmers to add entirely new kinds of information to programs, and control how it is processed.