zia

Brief and cryptic, it'll have to be. (See what time it is?) Not as cryptic as this entry or this one, but cryptic enough. So ... dl wants to be a language that can host programs written to be dynamically checked, like Python, but can have type annotations added (like Dylan or LISP), and can do type inference like Haskell. Its outer-level syntax is a bit reminiscent of the Beta language, and it inherits extensible algebraic types (aka "case classes") from Scala.

Controversial or unusual features include an explicit marking of references to names from "outer" scopes, a very lightweight "lambda" syntax, and generator expressions similar to the ones that will be in Python 2.4.

Note: this is a weblog entry, not a spec. It will probably have bits that are self-contradictory and some that are impossible to implement, but we'll see.