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"The Cecil Language: Specification and Rationale"

Introduction


This document describes the current design of Cecil, an object-oriented language intended to support the rapid construction of high-quality, reusable, extensible software systems [Chambers 92b, Chambers 93b, Chambers & Leavens 94]. Cecil is unusual in combining a pure, classless object model, multiple dispatching (multi-methods), modules, and mixed static and dynamic type checking. Cecil was inspired initially by Self [Ungar & Smith 87, Hölzle et al. 91a], CLOS [Bobrow et al. 88, Gabriel et al. 91], and Trellis [Schaffert et al. 85, Schaffert et al. 86]. The current version of Cecil extends the earlier version [Chambers 93a] with predicate objects, modules, and efficient typechecking algorithms.