The Howdy Glossary

Cecil is an experimental object-oriented language created by a team at INRIA, lead by Xavier Leroy in the 1990s. The language features a type system based on the intersection of parameters and return types to support multiple inheritance without creating ambiguities. Cecil's design was informed by the research on open implementation and semantic reflection — allowing objects to be redefined incrementally during program execution without restarting or rebuilding the application. However, despite this potential, Cecil did not achieve significant adoption and remains primarily used for academic research into programming languages.