Lambda the Ultimate

Games industry curmudgeon and interactive storytelling proponent Chris Crawford spoke at the Game Developers Exchange conference here in Atlanta yesterday. As a part of the talk he explained the "Nine Breakthroughs" that were important to his work on Storytron. I recorded them here...

Surprisingly, many of the ideas are about languages - either the programming languages used to program the games, or the language interfaces provided to users.

I'd think I want to allow a function with this type:

proc(class T cls) : T

And I want such functions to support type subclasses. For a simple instantiating example:

proc myfun(class Employee empcls) : Employee
return empcls.new()
...
Manager m = myfun(Manager);

Where

class Manager(Employee)
bonus : Dbl = 2.5 * salary; // :-)

Is this "principle of least surprise"? commonplace? or are there gotchas I'm not thinking about.

Thanks much.

Scott