1 Sep
2017
1 Sep
'17
3:26 a.m.
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 06:22:41PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
Indeed. But it builds on C.
So I'd need to understand more to believe that claim. And for the record,
what I'm going for is a new C that is still C enough to be useful but
fixes the problems enough to be a new language. Someone asked about
C++ and D, nope. Too far from C. I just want a C that fixes enough
of the problems that it is more acceptable to modern programmers but
is still C. Not sure if I'm explaining that well enough.
On Aug 31, 2017, at 2:46 PM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 04:37:17PM -0400, William Cheswick wrote:
Such a language would stop being C. I look to the likes of go and rust to get us back
on track. C is a pretty good assembly language.
So what chaps my grumpy old hide is why the heck do a whole new language
when you have one that is pretty good? Suppose we took C and added a
dialect via options:
--no-ptrs // use arrays and indices, you get bounds checking
--strings // system managed memory for strings, like tcl
--perlisms // if (buf =~ /re/) and unless (it_worked()) In Go you can use slices instead of arrays (but slices
are only one dimensional).
Ptrs are relatively safe as memory is garbage collected so e.g. a function can
return &local_variable. No perlism.
Go provides other features which are quite useful: concurrency, channels,
interfaces, packages.
People who like C tend to like Go. But Go is not low-level enough. No one
is writing a kernel in it! Or doing bare metal programming. AFAIK.
Exactly.
etc. Why
create an entirely new language, new syntax, new linkage, etc,
instead of fixing C's shortcomings?
C has too many problems. If you try fixing them, none of the "dusty decks"
would run on such a compiler + the new language would be severely
hampered in its evolution due to its C legacy. Algol family, class based, prototype based,
functional, array, logic,
visual, ... programming language are just what we have tried so far.
I don't think we are anywhere near the end of programming language
evolution.
Yep.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm