2 Mar
2025
2 Mar
'25
3:16 a.m.
On Sat, Mar 01, 2025 at 07:00:03PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
On Mar 1, 2025, at 6:16???PM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Yeah, it has no traction, I don't blame you in the slightest.
We did that with
https://www.little-lang.org/index.html which is a compiled
C like language. There are a ton of extensions to C that just made sense
to me. It never caught on but it still stands as an example of how you
could take C syntax and extend it to be more useful. Why people don't
do that is a mystery to me.
I looked at it when it was mentioned in the past. Didn't like it enough. 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.
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.