Introducing SABLE

SABLE is a general-purpose programming language derived from Smalltalk which runs on Microsoft® .NET and Mono¹ (i.e. on the ECMA CLR).

SABLE is the CLR's athletic body with Smalltalk's poetic spirit, a powerful combination of the best of both. SABLE brings the many benefits of the Smalltalk language and environments to the native CLR platform, to be a beneficial alternative to those languages based on C and BASIC.

The major features of SABLE include:

an elegant Smalltalk-derived syntax, for readability and simplicity,
strong typing, for correctness/validation, code completion, and fast execution,
bidirectional type inference, to drastically reduce type redundancy,
method-defined operators and control structures, so you can add new ones,
inlined functions, called "macros", which can make existing non-SABLE libraries easier to use,
class extensions, for adding to existing classes new operations (e.g. LINQ) and constants (e.g. OPCODES),
non-nilable types, to let you and the compiler know when an expression should never be Nil,
contracts, to support code quality,
full access to CLR concepts including generics, nested types, by-ref arguments, metadata attributes, etc.

The long-term goal is to create an environment where your programs are dynamically modifiable during development, then run with full CLR efficiency in production.

SABLE for Productivity

Productivity with Smalltalk has been referred to as "legendary" (meaning famously good, not fabled). Project teams have reported they are two to five times more productive in Smalltalk than in Java. Later we'll look at why this is true and how the same applies to SABLE.

SABLE supports the features of the CLR in a way that remains true to Smalltalk's simplicity. It retains the best of the language, with potential to support Smalltalk-like environment features, that we believe will bring the same productivity benefits. Imagine your next software project costing 50%-80% less. This is the promise of SABLE.

About this Document

The goals of this document are:

to present the general syntax and semantics of the SABLE language,
to demonstrate that it is as capable as any other .NET language,
to indicate its benefits for productivity and maintenance,
and to do so in a few pages.

The hope is to get you excited about SABLE, that you'll see it will make software development faster and a lot more fun! We believe you'll find the language natural, intuitive, and hightly readable.

This document assumes the reader is familiar with the concepts of object-oriented programming and of the CLR; it will not define terms used in either category. This document is neither a tutorial for beginning programmers nor an exhaustive reference manual.

Download SABLE

The SABLE Compiler is now available for download!

¹ Kuler Software Tools recognizes and respects the trademarks of others. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Mono is a registered trademark of Novell, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.