2 Mar
2025
2 Mar
'25
5:29 p.m.
On Mar 1, 2025, at 7:16 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
My comment was about innovation in the OS, not about any HLL.
Anyway, my main point was that please do something innovative and
interesting if you must use a new HLL for an OS!
So little-lang wasn't for OS stuff, it was for userland, but I feel it was
plenty innovative. It fit into C syntax but added a bunch of useful stuff.
string type that managed the memory in the language, no more malloc/free
crap. Case statements that could take variables, regexp as switches.
Perl like I/O with regex built in. It was just a pile of pleasant
enhancements to C. And it could be an OS language, I don't see why
not.
Sure.
If I had enough money, I'd fund a gcc
--lang=Little syntax and the world
would be a better place. In. My. Opinion. Not everyone elses but I
really believe if gcc had that dialect a lot of C people would move to it.
I'm not pushing my pet language, I'm holding it up as an example of how
you could make a new programming language. Take what works, extend it
with what works. Preserve people's knowledge rather than force them to
learn a new syntax that does the same thing. Extend rather than replace.
C's Achilles' heel is its type system. No extension can paper over
that. Once you fix that it is no longer C. Newer languages can in
fact be seen as fixing/adding things like proper strings, default
read/write rules, memory allocation rules, modules/packages,
object/closures, etc. over C. This is why I said they are not
particularly outstanding. A lot of it seems rather adhoc.