Cobra (programming language)

Cobra is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. Cobra is designed by Charles Esterbrook, and runs on the Microsoft .NET and Mono platforms. It is strongly influenced by Python, C#, Eiffel, Objective-C, and other programming languages. It supports both static and dynamic typing. It has support for unit tests and contracts. It has lambda expressions, closures, list comprehensions, and generators.

Cobra is an open-source project; it was released under the MIT License on February 29, 2008.

Updates are posted to the Cobra news forum with progress on features, fixes, documentation and related projects since the last update.

Features

Object-oriented

• Namespaces
• Classes, interfaces, structs, extensions, enumerations
• Methods, properties, indexers
• Mixins, extension methods
• Generics, attributes

Quality control

• Contracts, assertions
• Unit tests, docstrings
• Compile-time nil-tracking

Expressiveness

• Static and dynamic binding
• List, dictionary, and set literals
• in and implies operator
• for expressions
• Slicing
• Interpolated strings
• Compile-time type inference
• Lambdas and closures

General productivity

• Exception handling
• Postmortem exception report
• Garbage collection

Scripting conveniences

• Clean syntax
• Dynamic binding
• One-step run
• Shebang line (#!)

Miscellaneous

• Documentation tool (cobra -doc)
• Syntax highlighting tool (cobra -highlight)

Examples

The following examples can be run from a file using cobra <filename>.

Hello World

class Hello
    def main
        print 'hello'

A simple class

class Person

    var _name as String
    var _age as int

    cue init(name as String, age as int)
        _name, _age = name, age

    def toString as String is override
        return 'My name is [_name] and I am [_age] years old'

External links

• Official website
• The Cobra blog by Charles Esterbrook
• Cobra News Index

• Cobra News Forum