On 2007-02-22, Renee Klawitter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Perhaps you can list your planned features somewhere and others might
> take over ?
TODO.riot
> Would like to myself, but I lack the time, C skill and determination
> for that; what I've thought of after looking over your code some time
> ago was a C++ port/rewrite
Rewrites: lame, for kids with a lot of time in their hands.
C++: *yuck*. Too complex beast. There are four essential features
that would make C much less painful, only of which C++ does have,
and even it comes with too much complex baggage:
1. subtyping, i.e. the basic mechanism for the type system
to understand inheritance. Would rid object-style C code
from lots of ugly and unsafe casts, and make object system
far nicer to use.
2. Tagged unions/algebraic data types/pattern matching. So you
can have stuff like:
data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a
...
case x of
Nothing -> No parameter set
Just y -> Woot! Parameter set.
This would again rid C code of many unsafe C unions and other
hacks for unspecified parameter and so on.
3. Multiple return values for functions.
4. Function closures/first class functions. Hmm... might demand
a garbage collector for safe _and_ convenient implementation.
In any case, they're an essential feature of a language nice
to program in.
I think the first two and maybe the third are featured in some C
derivatives that still remain "low-level" languages...
--
Tuomo
