Tea (programming language)

Tea

Paradigm	Multi-paradigm: Functional, Object-oriented (class-based)
Developer	Jorge Nunes
First appeared	1997 (1997)
Website	www.pdmfc.com/tea
Influenced by
Tcl, Java, Scheme

Tea is a high level scripting language for the Java environment. It combines features of Scheme, Tcl, and Java.

• Integrated support for all major programming paradigms.
  • Functional programming language.
  • Functions are first class objects.
  • Scheme-like closures are intrinsic to the language.
  • Support for object oriented programming.
• Modular libraries with autoloading on demand facilities.
• Large base of core functions and classes.
  • String and list processing.
  • Regular expressions.
  • File and network I/O.
  • Database access.
  • XML processing.
• 100% Pure Java.
  • The Tea interpreter is implemented in Java.
  • Tea runs anywhere with a Java 1.6 JVM or higher.
  • Java reflection features allow the use of Java libraries directly from Tea code.
• Intended to be easily extended in Java. For example, Tea supports relational database access through JDBC, regular expressions through GNU Regexp, and an XML parser through a SAX parser (XML4J for example).

Interpreter alternatives

• Tea is a proprietary language. Its interpreter is subject to a non-free license. On the other hand, a project called "destea", which released Language::Tea in CPAN, provides an alternative to the proprietary interpreter, by generating Java Code based on the Tea code.
• There is an open source compiler known as TeaClipse that uses a JavaCC-generated parser to parse and then compile Tea source to the proprietary Tea bytecode. The author of TeaClipse has expressed interest in enhancing TeaClipse to produce Java bytecode.

External links

• Tea Home Page
• "destea" code converter