Re: Five Years After

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2018-01-24, Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 24 January 2018 13:50:20 UTC, Simon Clubley  wrote:
>
>> Going the other way, a subset of Ada might be useful as well.
>> 
>> 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.
>
> True but what features? With Ada, you need generics to be able to do anything
> due to the strictness. Would this new Oberon/Ada/C inspired language need
> generics?
>
> What other features would be required? I'd definitely go with ranged types at
> least, I like OO, I never got to grips with functional, but due to current
> hypetrains, people would want at least first class functions. What about
> pointers?
>

Ranged types (and pointers, but only Ada style pointers) would be
absolutely mandatory. Of course, that then raises the question of
runtime exceptions in some environments... (Maybe the exceptions
could be local to the current source file only).

Generics are an interesting one. The focus in my mind is on keeping
any required runtime support for language features to an absolute
minimum. It's possible to do more in the compiler front end provided
it didn't require massive amounts of design work and coding to
implement specific functionality.

The point would be to keep the language (and hence the compiler and
runtime) lightweight but still have a better language than C.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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