Fancy is a pure object-oriented

Object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...

 programming language that is heavily influenced by Smalltalk

Smalltalk

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

 and Ruby

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

. The language is currently under development as an open source project by Christopher Bertels.

Development

The language has been in development since the beginning of 2010 and has changed from a C++-based interpreter to be running on Rubinius, a dynamic bytecode virtual machine and implementation for the Ruby programming language.. Thus Fancy supports seamless integration with Ruby and any Ruby libraries.

Language characteristics

Fancy is a dynamic programming language. Meaning it will execute tasks at runtime that most languages would perform during compilation. Fancy is a garbage-collected

Garbage collection (computer science)

In computer science, garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the program...

 language, like Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 or Ruby

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

.
The goals of Fancy as a programming language are to be easily understandable by programming beginners, and to perform well enough to be used as a scripting language in Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 environments.

Fancy and Ruby

Fancy is implemented on top of Rubinius

Rubinius

Rubinius is an alternative Ruby programming language implementation created by Evan Phoenix. Based loosely on the Smalltalk-80 Blue Book design, Rubinius seeks to"provide a rich, high-performance environment for running Ruby code."-Goals:...

, the Ruby VM, and therefore integrates well with Ruby. Since Fancy is built on Ruby objects, the authors decided to allow access to the original Ruby classes by using a different syntax. For this reason, Fancy can be extended easily to use Ruby libraries, or any of the C-extensions that are native to Ruby.
Recently, a Ruby Gem was released for automated installation of the language.

Author

Christopher Bertels is a Computer Science and Philosophy student at the University of Osnabruck in Germany. He has been working on the Fancy language for around a year, and has spoken about Fancy at the 2010 Ruby and Rails European conference and the Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON.

Features

• Class definitions that are also used as namespaces (via nested classes)
• Loop-, Iteration- & common Collection methods (including next/break)
• Closures (Blocks)
• A simple package management system, similar to RubyGems
• Simple pattern matching
• Easy reflection (as in Ruby)
• Literal support for Regular Expressions, Arrays, Tuples, Ranges, Hashes (Dictionaries), Blocks, Integers, Floats, Symbols, (Multiline) Strings and more
• Exception Handling
• Dynamically scoped variables (like Common Lisp)
• A bootstrapped
  Bootstrapping (compilers)
  In computer science, bootstrapping is the process of writing a compiler in the target programming language which it is intended to compile...
  
   (self-hosted
  Self-hosting
  The term self-hosting was coined to refer to the use of a computer program as part of the toolchain or operating system that produces new versions of that same program—for example, a compiler that can compile its own source code. Self-hosting software is commonplace on personal computers and larger...
  
  , completely in Fancy written) compiler
  Compiler
  A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
  
   for generating Rubinius bytecode
  Bytecode
  Bytecode, also known as p-code , is a term which has been used to denote various forms of instruction sets designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter as well as being suitable for further compilation into machine code...
  
  
• Easy integration with Ruby: Calling out to any Ruby libraries that run on Rubinius, including most C-extensions

Implementation

The implementation of the current release is a runtime using the Rubinius virtual machine, meaning that the language is running on the same platform as Ruby, and is accompanied by a self-hosted (bootstrapped compiler

Bootstrapping (compilers)

In computer science, bootstrapping is the process of writing a compiler in the target programming language which it is intended to compile...

) that generated Rubinius

Rubinius

Rubinius is an alternative Ruby programming language implementation created by Evan Phoenix. Based loosely on the Smalltalk-80 Blue Book design, Rubinius seeks to"provide a rich, high-performance environment for running Ruby code."-Goals:...

 bytecode

Bytecode

Bytecode, also known as p-code , is a term which has been used to denote various forms of instruction sets designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter as well as being suitable for further compilation into machine code...

. To allow more simple cross-platform development, nearly all of the standard library is written in Fancy itself.

Examples

Description	Syntax
Simple print	"hello world!" println
Looped print 5 times	5 times: { "hello world!" println }
Calling methods	var method1: param1 . method2
Calling Ruby methods	var ruby_method1(param1) ruby_method2
Class Definitions	class Person { read_write_slots: ['name, 'age, 'country] "Creates a new Person instance with the given name, age and country." p = Person new p name: name p age: age p country: country p }
Nested classes	class Outer { class Inner { class InnerMost { def football { "football" } } } } instance = Outer Inner InnerMost new instance football println