Editing BETA (programming language) (section)

===Technical overview===
From a technical perspective, BETA provides several unique features. Classes and Procedures are unified to one concept, a [[BETA pattern|Pattern]]. Also, classes are defined as properties/attributes of objects.  This means that a class cannot be instantiated without an explicit object context. A consequence of this is that BETA supports [[nested class]]es. Classes can be virtually defined, much like virtual methods can be in most object-oriented programming languages. Virtual entities (such as methods and classes) are never overwritten; instead they are redefined or specialized.

BETA supports the object-oriented perspective on programming and has comprehensive facilities for procedural and functional programming. It has powerful abstraction mechanisms to support identification of objects, classification and composition. BETA is a statically typed language like Simula, [[Eiffel (programming language)|Eiffel]] and [[C++]], with most type checking done at compile-time.<ref name="overview"/> BETA aims to achieve an optimal balance between compile-time type checking and run-time type checking.