Re: Five Years After

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 8:12:51 AM UTC-7, Mehdi Saada wrote:
> > There's serious potential for a good small language that could serve
> > as an easily implemented C language replacement. It's possible that
> > a subset of Ada with just the core features implemented and hence
> > without vast amounts of required runtime library support could
> > serve that purpose.
>  
> > Think of something that had the kind of functionality of a beefed up
> > version of Oberon with all of the Ada type safety features imported
> > into it for example.
> 
> I'm a  in position to talk, and I know peanuts about Oberon, but can I ask you something... What is "core" for you ? Is tasking part of it ? Full-featured generics ? Support for exceptions or clause representations ? Class-wide programming and interfaces ? Or what do you not feel as essential ?
> I'm sure there's a bunch others would deem essential and "core". But I am sure too, those things put together already make for a big piece of work for compiler designers.
> Remove any of it, Ada will feel hollow... Or I just found myself a purist :-P
> Plus, if it's only for having a safer and nicer equivalent to D or Rust, it's not worth the effort, and I doubt people will even consider.

I rather agree; but if there was a small "core" replacement for C, I think it would have to be (1) representation clauses, (2) tasking, and (3) generics.