The Nice Programming Language / News: Recent posts

The lack of generic classes in Java is its most annoying restriction. It forces you to write a lot of casts, which make the code less readable and might include bugs. The next version of the JDK (1.5) will probably include generics, but it is still about one year away.

The Nice programming langage is an extension of Java. It has in particular generic classes, among other powerful features. Since the last release, it uses the java.util.* collections with the generic types they will have in JDK 1.5. This means that you can reuse you knowledge about java collections to program in Nice. All Java libraries are available from Nice programs.... read more

Nice is a new object-oriented programming language. It compiles to Java bytecode, and makes it very easy to use Java libraries.
In addition, it extends Java with advanced features:

* parametric types: this is especially for containers (list, hast-tables)
and allows for shorter and safer code.
* higher-order functions: functions can be manipulated as first-class
objects, just like in Lisp and ML. This is much lighter than Java's
inner classes in many situations, for instance with listeners in a GUI.
* multi-methods: they allow methods to be defined outside
classes. This means that new methods can be defined on classes that
belong to a different package (even in java.*).
Multi-methods alse extend usual methods with the possibility to
dispatch on every argument, instead of only the receiver class.
This supersedes the Visitor pattern.
* tuples: this allows in particular methods to return several values.
* named and optional parameters to methods.
* ...... read more

The forums are starting to have traffic. The best way to read messages easily is to monitor the forums, so that you don't have to visit the web-site to check.
Visit a forum and click on "Monitor Forum"
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=40268

You can get a version of the nice compiler
on sourceforge.

The sources are being made available through CVS.