Beta - A Programming Language

BETA is a pure object oriented programming language developed by Scandinavian School in System Development, Nordic Universities.

This was released after a series of enhancements of their first object oriented language SimulaI which was a simulation language. Soon it was generalized into Simula67 which had the object oriented framework, and worked on the concepts of class, sub-class, virtual functions etc. This was enhanced by another object oriented language Delta that worked for system description; this meant it could express predicate logic and state changes. This was a non-executable effort and thus did not qualify as a language. So it was decided to design a programming language Gamma that works as Delta but is executable.

Eventually, Gamma was never made, rather Beta was made. While Beta was being made, it was realized that Beta was much more powerful than what Gamma would be or ever could be. Beta is a programming language like C++.

Currently, BETA is available on UNIX workstations, on PowerPC Macintosh and on Intel-based PCs. BETA has an optimum balance between compile time checking and run time checking. The type cast checking is done at compile time, however, for the entire set of type check and type conversion to be done at compile time requires a lot of time and thus increases the complexity of a program. Thus, an optimum balance has been made.

BETA is a logical description of the language. It works on the concepts of class, sub-class, virtual functions etc. It also contains transient variables, ones whose scope is program execution, and persistent variables, those whose values are retained in the disk space and are available at the time of next execution.