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Orthagonality

• Principles are tools for language design.
• Suggest lines for language extensions.
• Encourage orthagonal languages
  • Small number of core concepts.
  • Ways of uniformly combining these concepts.
  • Semantics of combinations are uniform i.e. there are no special restrictions for specific instances of combinations.
• Example: function result types
  • Pascal: only scalar types.
  • ML: any type.

Orthagonality reduces mental overhead for understanding a language, as well for its design and implementation as for its use.