This repository contains the design of the Inca programming language. This is (obviously) a work in progress. Hopefully implementation will follow at some point.
Inca is an experimental language created to explore some design possibilites
for future programming languages. It introduces some radical concepts that,
to the best of my knowledge, are not present in other programming languages.
One such concept is incrementallity (hence the name INCa), which is
developed more in the corresponding document. For proper
incremental compilation, the language needs to rely on a well design module
system. Inca basically uses the trait mechanism of Scala, described
in Scalable Component Abstraction.
Inca is more than just another programming language. It aims at being a complete development system. In this sense, the design of Inca is strongly influenciated by the potential tooling around the language. For example, Inca does not recognize a concept of file or compilation unit. A program &mdash or rather a component &mdash is always fully represented in the RAM of a running compiler. The end goal is to use an editor aware of this system, that will provide a clean structuration of the program according to the components, and not the filenames. The incremental and interactive compiler will be the basis to build such editors.