AmbientTalk/2 Tutorial

The AmbientTalk/2 tutorial is subdivided into major chapters which each highlight a particular aspect of the language. These “aspects” can sometimes be best described as particular programming styles.

1. Preface
2. Interactive AmbientTalk (IAT) Shell
3. Functional and Imperative Programming
   1. Variables
   2. Tables
   3. Functions
   4. Closures
   5. Blocks
   6. Keywords
   7. Native Data Types
   8. Control Flow Constructs
4. Object-oriented Programming
   1. Objects, fields and methods
   2. Sending messages
   3. Cloning and instantiation
   4. Delegation and cloning
   5. Delegation and dynamic inheritance
   6. First-class delegation
   7. Encapsulation
   8. Uniform Access
5. On Scoping, Closures, Methods and Messages
   1. Lexical Scope vs Object Scope
   2. Nesting Objects
   3. Methods vs Closures
   4. External Methods and Fields
   5. First-class Methods
   6. First-class Messages
6. Modular Programming
   1. Namespaces and the lobby
   2. Importing objects
   3. Objects as traits
   4. Classifying objects using type tags
   5. Exception Handling
   6. Escaping Continuations
7. Metaprogramming
   1. AmbientTalk without syntactic sugar
   2. Quasiquoting and splicing
   3. First-class abstract grammar
   4. Multi-stage Generative Programming
8. Symbiotic programming with Java
   1. Symbiosis Architecture
   2. Accessing Java from within AmbientTalk
   3. Accessing AmbientTalk from within Java
9. Reflective Programming
   1. Mirrors
   2. Mirages
   3. The Metaobject Protocol
10. Concurrent Programming with Actors
    1. Threads Vs Actors
    2. Actors and Far References
    3. Asynchronous Message Sending
    4. Isolates
    5. Futures
    6. Actor Mirrors
    7. Nesting Actors
11. Distributed Programming
    1. Going Online
    2. Exporting and Discovering Objects
    3. Dealing with Transient Failures
    4. Dealing with Permanent Failures
    5. Taking Offline Remote Objects
12. Appendix: Libraries
    1. Unit testing framework
    2. Basic Collections
    3. Top-level Functions
    4. Custom Exceptions
    5. Language Extensions
    6. Utilities