Some Thoughts on Programming Language Design
This is a collection of ideas to look at when inventing new langauges.
Other Ideas
- The Language pushes abstraction to the limit by not noting any hardware-related issues like memory-allocations, parallelism, heterogenous computer architecture (CPU, GPU, …) - requires a very "intellegent" compiler and a way to describe unknowns like possible inputs, etc. in the language itself
- Start with assembly but add a very flexible macro system
Type System
# Haskell data LinkedList a = Nil | Cons a (Box (LinkedList a)) data Test = Empty | Blub Int | State { x :: Int, y :: Int } # Rust enum LinkedList{ Nil, Cons(T, LinkedList ) }
Memory Management
- Drop when out-of-scope
- Garbage collections
- Reference counting
Compile-time logic
- Annotation when calling function to be run as-far-as-possible at comptime
fn format(template: String, args: [String]) -> String { template.replace("@", (match, i) => args[i]) } fun add(x, y) x + y fun main() print(format!("@ ist @; @", ["1+1", 1+1, x])) # should expand to fun main() print("1+1 ist 2; " ~ x))
Examples
Fizz-Buzz
for (n in 0..100) { if (n % (3*5) == 0) print("FizzBuzz") else if (n % 3 == 0) print("Fizz") else if (n % 5 == 0) print("Buzz") else print(n) } if (true) x = 1 if (true) { x = 1 }
f(x) = 10 + g(x) f x = 10 + g x main = { }
changes to this article (as recorded with git; visible on codeberg)
2023-01-08 77eef59 more ideas 2022-11-10 0bef88a include new features