TEA is designed to be a portable language inspired by Object-oriented Pascal but built on the C runtime. As a language, it has the following goals:
- Use in a broad set of architectures and platforms, similar to where C is used.
- Platform independent common libraries.
- Type safety even through coercion.
- Support Object Oriented Programming concepts of Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism.
- The language avoids features that can create readability and maintainability problems.
- Encapsulation through classes.
- Single-inheritance model.
- No casting operator.
- Classes can implement interfaces.
- Short-circuiting logic.
- No goto or jump support.