BETA is a modern language in the Simula tradition. The resulting language is smaller than Simula in spite of being considerably more expressive. BETA is a strongly typed language like Simula, Eiffel and C++, with most type checking being carried out at compile-time. It is well known that it is not possible to obtain all type checking at compile time without sacrificing the expressiveness of the language. BETA has optimum balance between compile-time type checking and run-time type checking.