Scheme with classes, mixins, and traits

Abstract

The Scheme language report advocates language design as the composition of a small set of orthogonal constructs, instead of a large accumulation of features. In this paper, we demonstrate how such a design scales with the addition of a class system to Scheme. Specifically, the PLT Scheme class system is a collection of orthogonal linguistic constructs for creating classes in arbitrary lexical scopes and for manipulating them as first-class values. Due to the smooth integration of classes and the core language, programmers can express mixins and traits, two major recent innovations in the object-oriented world. The class system is implemented as a macro in terms of procedures and a record-type generator; the mixin and trait patterns, in turn, are naturally codified as macros over the class system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.