[ Thanks to Lee
Schlesinger for this link. ]
“Along with Java, the Tcl and Scheme languages have had an
influence on Tea. Tea combines features that are hard to find
elsewhere in a single language: support for functional programming,
closures (taken from Scheme, of course), full object-oriented
programming support, library autoloading facilities, and lots of
core classes and functions for common functionality like
networking, I/O, string processing, and XML. Support for popular
DBMSes like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix or
Microsoft SQL Server is included.“However, open source purists should be aware that the official
Tea interpreter, unlike the other Tea tools, is proprietary, ergo
so is the bytecode that results from its use. That means that you
can get Tea and use it for personal projects, but for commercial
use you have to ask for permission. There are alternatives, though:
One is a Perl project called destea that released Language::Tea in
CPAN, which generates Java code based on your Tea code. You can
also try an open source compiler called TeaClipse, which
unfortunately looks a bit neglected at the moment.”