Internal documentation — Work in progress

This page has not been confirmed as accurate or approved for publication. Current documentation version: 0.1.0-internal.1.

Classes, interfaces, and composition

Interfaces, spelled face, are Sagan's primary composition mechanism. Interfaces may compose interfaces; classes declare conformance with is or has; multiple interfaces are comma-separated; and self refers to the current object.

This composition-first direction is settled design. Deep inheritance hierarchies are not the intended reuse mechanism. A leading dot is intended to mark a private member.

Implemented lexically: face, class, is, has, self, member dots, and the surrounding punctuation.

Open questions: explicit versus structural conformance, default implementations, conflict resolution, object construction, storage layout, dispatch, value/reference behavior, visibility semantics, and whether limited implementation inheritance will exist.