r/ProgrammingLanguages

I used to like Python for its abundance of english words instead of operators which makes it more readable.

However, I have often seen the common notion where people prefer symbols over keywords. Lately, some of the newer languages have added both new keywords and new symbols.

For eg: Rust using |var| semantics for callback functions. The popular defer that has existed for very long in multiple languages. C adding [[...]] for attributes

Now even though I am saying || and [[]] are new symbols added, they aren't operators, they are just replacing some brackets essentially for a different type of task.

With this context, here is my question:

What if instead of these keywords: await, async, defer, try, catch, weren't keywords, they were replaced by some operator?

There are two cases in my mind, either replace the keywords with a single operator (@ could replace await), annotating the data, or, use a combination of operators (-! could be used to mark a function that can produce an error).

I have the concern, that it may look too ugly because there are a bunch of operators, and in the case of combination of operators, two operators together, changing the meaning of the single operator is also weird.

But, I still wanted to ask, seeing how more experienced people view this situation.

Also, what if, both the operator and the keyword is present? Would that just be wrong because now there are two ways to do the same thing?

Hey everyone, I've been wondering how you all manage your time. I work from 7am to 4pm and go to university from 6pm to 10pm (UTC-3). It's been a while since I've had time to work on my language. How do you balance personal life, work, and still find time for side projects like this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1tesrye/decimal_separators_used_in_europe/

Only English (including USA) uses a dot as a decimal separator. Imagine it used comma (,) instead. Pick a popular programming language and imagine how it would look, taking into account all of its historical influences.

I'd guess C would just insist on whitespace when listing stuff. That, or it would use ";" to list stuff, with I guess "." becoming a statement separator, and "\" to reach into structs, why not. 😃

Is there alphabetic list of desing flaws/bad ideas in various programming languages?

For exampe you might find short description of dangling-else from under d letter in list.

How would you feel about a language that has a borrow checker with a prototyping mode for rapid iteration? In this mode, proper annotations would still be required (failure to do so would result in compile errors) because the compiler still needs that information to reason about lifetimes, but violations of the rules themselves would result in warnings. Compiling in safe mode would be just like Rust, resulting in errors.

Do you think this would meaningfully improve iteration times for domains which require it (game dev, for example)?

Would this defeat the purpose of a borrow checker, in that most would follow the path of least resistance and not bother to clean up after themselves, resulting in an ecosystem of unsafe libraries?

I wrote a beginner-friendly blog post about Pratt parsing, hopefully it can help more people understand it. This is actually what I wanted to see when I was learning it; when I was reading Bjarne Stroustrup's book on C++ he also builds a little math parser and it is really simple to follow. The code for the full project is also available at the end of the post under the citations.

Imagine you start with the C language and then make the following changes:

1. Remove pointer arithmetic. You want an array, you declare an array.
2. Change the compilation of string and array literals to emit a length prefix.
3. Rewrite the entire standard library so that all string and array functions enforce a length header in front of the data.
4. Add RTTI to all unions and varargs so that incorrect casts fail rather than UB.
5. Remove `void *`.
6. Forbid malloc() without static compile-time verification that the matching free() exists (with some sort of Bounded Model Checking to sidestep a rather inconvenient Halting Problem).

Is such a language possible?

Has it ever been attempted?

Since few days, I have been working on a compiler written in python. I have successfully implemented a frontend and I want a backend to generate IR for. I have decided to make my own IR but I don't know a lot about them. Can y'all please provide me with information with types of IR, optimization tricks they utilise, and how they are implemented or work. Any type of material will be thankful.

Hi all,
apologies for my inexperience, I'm not formally trained in CS.

I'm writing a small programming language to play around with some ideas, and I've come to the point of implementing constants folding. While doing so, I realized the AST token I use to group binary operators could probably be split in 2 different tokens instead: one for operations that return the same type of all the inputs (like addition/multiplication/etc: `add(a: T, b:T) -> T`) and one for operations that return a different type (e.g.: `greather_than(a: T, b;T) -> bool` and friends).

Out of curiosity, is there a specific name for a function whose output type is the same as the type of all its parameters ? It would help me name those 2 different categories appropriately.

I want to include compile time evaluation in my language.

For context I have most of the language design and compiler planned out and am currently implementing it. Currently writing the parser that turns a stream of tokens into the ast. The plan is to target llvm ir for the moment.

While I have enough to do before I have to address it I want to get some information about executing code at compile time. I am explicitly not talking about macros for them I already have an idea. My questions are:

1. How to decide rather to execute a function or keep the call in code

2. Security concern about access to the system on compile time evaluation

3. How to execute it without writing a separate interpreter

4. Does llvm provide any supporting features for this

Thanks