Traits and Interfaces¶
Like other object-oriented languages, Pony has subtyping. That is, some types serve as categories that other types can be members of.
There are two kinds of subtyping in programming languages: nominal and structural. They’re subtly different, and most programming languages only have one or the other. Pony has both!
If you’ve done object-oriented programming before, you may have seen a lot of discussion about single inheritance, multiple inheritance, mixins, traits, and similar concepts. These are all examples of nominal subtyping.
The core idea is that you have a type that declares it has a relationship to some category type. In Java, for example, a class (a concrete type) can implement an interface (a category type). In Java, this means the class is now in the category that the interface represents. The compiler will check that the class actually provides everything it needs to.
In Pony, nominal subtyping is done via the keyword is. is declares at the point of declaration that an object has a relationship to a category type. For example, to use nominal subtyping to declare that the class Name provides Stringable, you’d do:
