• Parametric polymorphism. Although superficially similar to C++'s templates, this implementation is based on the Hindley/Milner typing systems of ML and Haskell.
• First-class functions. Similar to the blocks of Smalltalk, functions and procedures may be passed as parameters, stored in variables and returned from methods.
• Class cases and pattern matching. Pizza includes support for visitor-style patterns directly in the language, allowing much more expressive and readable code.

The yellow table of contents to the upper-right of each page will help you navigate through the Pizza site. This page is the Home page of the site. There are a number of Mirrors worldwide; you might want to look for a location which improves your loading times. The Frequently Asked Questions list will help you to get fast answers to some of the questions we see frequently. The Distribution page is where you can download the compiler itself. The Mirrors will help you find the copy of this web site which is closest to you. The Support page contains information about Pizza mailing lists, a list of known compiler bugs and an Emacs major mode for Pizza programs. The Documents page has a short web-based tutorial on Java and Pizza, plus the Pizza language definition. Some of the best things we could tell you about Pizza is how useful it is...but we'll let other people do the talking. The Users page points to discussions of how Pizza has been used in education, research and industry. Finally, the People page tells you a bit about us, and the Links points to some other pages of interest.