Ambient-Oriented Programming

How to read the documentation: the above language reference is a modified Javadoc documentation extracted from the interpreter's source code. The documentation talks about classes, packages and interfaces. Of course, these concepts do not exist in AmbientTalk. However, at the implementation-level, a class in the interpreter corresponds to an abstract data type provided to the AmbientTalk programmer. Its methods correspond to the methods which the AmbientTalk programmer can invoke upon them. Thus, if you want to look up what methods are applicable on numbers, check the methods of class Number.

Methods that take an Object[] as an argument should be interpreted as taking an arbitrary number of arguments (i.e. an @args parameterlist in AmbientTalk).

Note that the class hierarchy does not accurately reflect the delegation hierarchy in between objects. All objects eventually delegate to Nil, so all methods defined on Nil are applicable on all objects.

The language reference documents:

• edu.vub.at.actors.*: data types pertaining to AmbientTalk actors.
• edu.vub.at.objects: the methods available on native data types
• edu.vub.at.objects.grammar: the structure of abstract syntax tree objects (for metaprogramming)
• edu.vub.at.objects.natives: the object marked LexicalRoot documents all operations available in the global lexical scope (top-level definitions, accessible unqualified). The object marked System documents the system native object.

The most important functionality available in the standard library shipped with the AmbientTalk distribution is summarized in the tutorial's appendix and its source code is accessible here.