2 Mar
2025
2 Mar
'25
5:54 p.m.
On Sunday, March 2nd, 2025 at 9:29 AM, Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
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.
For me though that speaks to the fact that C leaves a lot to the imagination. You've
got the building blocks of a number of higher level concepts, but implementation thereof
is left to the user. Of course you have these various extensions pop up, but the base
language does not define the "one true way" to do it, rather, each case can be
engineered with context in mind.
I personally wouldn't see a one size fits all "upgrade" of the language
gaining steam in this regard, partially because it wouldn't need to. C is great at
what it is for, keeping it simple ensures a solid foundation on which more complex systems
can be built without painting any given concern into a corner. But you know what they
say, with great power comes great responsibility. If folks don't need that power or
don't want that responsibility, there are a glut of other languages, both general and
focused, for whatever need they may have that C cannot meet.
To spin another quote ask not what your language of choice can do for you, ask what you
can do for your language of choice. In other words, the growth of new features in a
language doesn't always need to be an addition to the specification, it instead can
be novel use that is then shared with others to the benefit of all that language's
adherents.
- Matt G.
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.