Here are technical papers written for either documentation purposes or just stuff I found interesting enough to write about. Beware, some of this material may be highly technical. Other papers may be specific to projects like the ISG. Many of these are works in progress.
Before writing my own scripting language, I set out to determine if there was a pre-existing language I could use. So I first identified my requirements: Embeddable (it could be included in my application), Threaded (several script threads need to be running in parallel), Sandbox (should be safe to execute untrusted code), and Portable (to at least Windows 9X, Macintosh, and Linux). Of course, another important issue is the terms for licensing the language.
Beyond my basic requirements, I wanted a language which was: Garbage Collected, Object Oriented, Typed, Had parameterized types, Was fast, and had a good Syntax. For comparison, I included the specs of the language I intend to write (though with the complete feature set which probably won't make it into the initial version).
Download the language comparison document as a Word Doc or in Html.
Starts with a description of the resource system in place, and then goes into the various design decisions which were made. I should note that I refined the design iteratively many times by attempting to write a body of code in the proposed language: specifically the standard library of basic services.
Download the Joos language design document as a Word Doc or in Html.