Re: Language Design (was Standard Ada Preprocessor)

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <warren@ve3wwg.tk>]

stephen.freeman9 wrote:
> This argument about C (and D) is very interesting - I have been working on
> Safety related work (Uk Defstan SIL 3/ Sil 4 software and  DO178b level a)
> for flying aircraft.  We use Ada (Spark Ada at that) to develop code.
> However the world in general knows C not Ada.  D helps to strengthen C as
> does Misra (see Misra 2 for latest invocation)  but as said - what is
> lacking is definition of ranges (and strong typing) . A possible solution
> I'm working on is "E" for want of a more novel name.  This should look like
> C but ask the programmer to define typedef's for each logically different
> type s/he is using and as a comment specify the ranges that that is valid
> for.  It then needs a pre-processor to parse that to check for
> inconsistancies. (perhaps convert it to Ada?)

For my taste, there is too much interest in creating new
languages that look like C. I am OK with borrowing
successful concepts from any language (if it makes
sense), but to me D is just an improved C, just like
Java is a flavour of C++, and C# yet another flavour.

IMO, it would be better for the designer to step
back from experienace in several languages (not
just the C/C++/C#/Java camp) and look at the
problems that the language is designed to solve.

Learn from the ancestors, but some small subset
of those languages shouldn't dictate how the new
one gets defined. IOW, the design effort shouldn't
be stated as "a better version of C" ;-)

What that kind of statement effectively says is
that C is so good that we should use that
as a starting point for improving that model.

I would rather "they" examine the questions:
what has C done well? What has PASCAL
done well? What has Modula-3 done well? What has
Ada done well? What has <functional languages>
done well?  Take away the winning concepts and
use only the concepts as a basis for design.

Surely the C string handling and arrays in general
is flawed by the lack of range constraints. Can
"they" not improve upon that? Well, no: not if
their mandate is a better C.

</rant> ;-)
-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://ve3wwg.tk