The Green language type system

A programming language that considers basic values and classes as objects brings more opportunities of code reuse and it is easier to use than a language that does not support this feature. However, popular statically typed object-oriented languages do not consider classes as first-class objects because this concept is difficult to integrate with static type checking. They also do not consider basic values as objects for sake of efficiency. This article presents the Green language type system which supports classes as classless objects and offers a mechanism to treat basic values as objects. The result is a reasonably simple type system which is statically typed and easy to implement. It simplifies several other language mechanisms and prevents any infinite regression of metaclasses.