Virtual entities (such as methods and classes) are never overwritten; instead they are redefined or specialized.
It has powerful abstraction mechanisms to support identification of objects, classification and composition.
A major and peculiar feature of the language is the concept of patterns.
As another comparison, a procedure in C++ could have the form In BETA, such a function could be written using a pattern The x, y and z are local variables.
The conditional block is delimited by (if and if), that is the if keyword becomes part of the opening and closing parenthesis.