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Can we design a language (cpp-prime?) that is basically c++ but makes parsing easier? I'm thinking reduce the keyword reuse, use different symbols for multiplic

Can we design a language (cpp-prime?) that is basically c++ but makes parsing easier? I'm thinking reduce the keyword reuse, use different symbols for multiplication and pointers etc. The code would be easy for c++ developers to read and converting between the two could be automatic. However, we would be able to build tooling for this new language much more easily. It would also compile quicker.

saagarjha 7y ago
C?
- jstimpfle 7y ago
  C has its own parsing problems.
  - eru 7y ago
    Yes, though I don't think it's undecidable to parse.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
In theory that's D. D was designed to be easier to parse than C++, for example, it uses Foo!Bar and Foo!(Bar, 4) template syntax rather than Foo<Bar> and Foo<Bar, 4>. On the other hand, it still uses templates and supports mixins (basically #define on steroids), so while it's easy to parse, large chunks of code don't exist until compile time so can't be indexed by IDEs perfectly.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  And as much as I like their community, I feel it already lost its spotlight opportunity, due to their lack of manpower vs other languages offerings and continuous improvements. Even if C++ is a little baroque, C++17 and now C++20 provide many of the D's benefits, while keeping all the libraries, and finally we are getting Java like C++'s tooling to just throw it away.
  - otabdeveloper4 7y ago
    > due to their lack of manpower vs other languages offerings and continuous improvements No. D failed due to a mandatory GC and the 'two standard libraries' idiocy.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Plenty of GC enabled system languages have proven their value, up to building full stack graphical workstations, so far they just lacked somg big corp political and monetary willingness to push them down the anti-GC devs no matter what. Thanfully with the likes of Swift on iDevices, Java/Kotlin on Android (with an increasingly constrained NDK), COM/UWP über alles + .NET on Windows, ChromeOS + gVisor, Unreal + GCed C++, those devs will have a very tiny niche to contend with. I give it about 10 years time, for pure manual memory management to be like Assembly and embedded development.
      - jstimpfle 7y ago
        > I give it about 10 years time, for pure manual memory management to be like Assembly and embedded development. For someone who has spent some time thinking about memory management strategies, manual MM isn't actually that much additional work. By far, most code doesn't allocate or free (and that's a good thing). So MM->GC is hardly like Assembly->Compiler. In Assembly you're constantly allocating and pigeonholing, and you can't have nice names for things. Assembly->Compiler is a huge step compared to MM->GC, and GC can cause a lot of headaches as well. (disclaimer, I've done almost no assembly at all).
        pjmlp 7y ago
        On single developer projects as long as one doesn't stay too much away from them, scale it up to multiple sized distributed teams, add binary libraries, and you end up with double frees, leaks and ownership issues all over the place.
        gpderetta 7y ago
- rienbdj 7y ago
  Not quite, because D brings many other things. I mean something that is equivalent to C++, with all of the same semantics, but a less ambiguous grammar.
pjmlp 7y ago
It is called Ada.
- choeger 7y ago
  Take an upvote!
xiphias2 7y ago
Rust seems to be the most successful zero-overhead language competitor to C++, though it's far not as mature as C++ yet.
- jokoon 7y ago
  Rust has a high learning curve (borrowing, etc). Rust is a competitor to ADA, not C++. You can certainly ask developers to write things in rust instead, and even progressively rewrite codebase in rust since it's compatible with C++, but a language is about adopters, and ease of learning for beginners and students.
  - carlmr 7y ago
    Counterpoint, when you write C++ you need to think about borrowing without the compiler telling you when you're making a mistake. Rust in that sense is easier than C++.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Only if you are not using a recent version of clang or VC++. CppCon 2019: “Lifetime analysis for everyone” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d67kfSnhbpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d67kfSnhbpA It is available to play on Godbolt.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    To compete with Ada, Rust needs to offer something like SPARK, binary libraries, Ada like IDEs, real time specification, and most important certified compilers.
  - unrealhoang 7y ago
    Counterpoint, Rust is actually easier to learn, and take way less time from inception to writing production-ready code.
    - jokoon 7y ago
      even the tutorial says that borrowing has a high learning curve
gpderetta 7y ago
You could, but the incompatibility is not necessarily worth it. There was some talk to take advantage of the transition to modules to be able to mark translation units as implementing a specific version of the standard (I think rust doese something similar) to allow for backward incompatibile Evolution of the language. The committee doesn't seem to keen because they fear the language fragmenting and from a more practical point of views we will be still #including legacy code into new modules for at leas a decade (and I'm probably wildly optimistic).
- gmueckl 7y ago
  With the glacial pace in which new language features are picked up by users of C++, I'd be surprised if modules have significant adoption in the first decade after C++20. It'll probably take at least two to three years to get stable support in most of the tooling and then anther couple of years until people start to believe that they are battle tested enough.
fanf2 7y ago
Damian Conway has a couple of papers from 1996 suggesting a better syntax for C++ http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/#Human_Factors_in_Programming_Languages http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/#Human_Factors_in_Pro...
- oblio 7y ago
  You know your proposal failed when there's people born back then that have just finished college this year and they still won't be able to use the changes you proposed ;-)
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Oh, you haven't read this classic paper? http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/PDF/ModestProposal.pdf http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/PDF/ModestProposal.pd... "We describe an alternative syntactic binding for C++. This new binding includes a completely redesigned declaration/definition syntaxfor types, functions and objects, a simplified template syntax, and changes to several problematic operators and control structures. Theresulting syntax is LALR(1) parsable and provides better consistency in the specification of similar constructs, better syntacticdifferentiation of dissimilar constructs, and greater overall readability of code."
etalian 7y ago
I wondered the same a while ago, and it turns out you can, in fact to test this hypothesis I ended up implementing such a language myself. The resulting syntax can express every construct from modern C++, is fully LALR(1) (no ambiguities and no vexing parses), has fewer keywords and is in general shorter than the equivalent C++ code, and once you know the syntax it is (subjectively) easier to read too (no spiral rule for example). Plus of course it can fully interoperate with existing C++. Have been waiting to make it open source until I have finished writing the user manual (aiming for the end of this year), if that's interesting to you I post updates about it on twitter at cigmalang.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Do you have any examples of the syntax?
BubRoss 7y ago
I say it all the time here, but there was a cool language called clay which was a great redesign of C with modern C++ techniques. It is not kept up anymore. It has an elegant design that, while not perfect, has a lot to offer. http://claylabs.com/clay/ http://claylabs.com/clay/
bluGill 7y ago
There are been hundreds of attempts using a number of different ideas. The reason for C++ and not those alternatives is there is a lot of C++ code. If most of my code is C++ I don't gain anything from your new language as I spend most of my time maintaining old code. Even if I use your language for new code that means I constantly have to remember if I'm fixing a bug using C++ code rules or the new language rules. Some projects have successfully done this and eventually re-wrote everything. However others have not and the pain of a new language is a problem. The other problems with that approach means C++ is everywhere. I know that I can find a good compiler for C++ when I want to switch platforms. Will your new language support my new platform? Will your new language even exist? I've worked on a number of projects where the code was written in some language where the compiler vendor is out of business. This risk works against all new languages (some have overcome it, some have not). With C++ I know if I need to hire more people I can hire experts to help out. If I choose your language do I have to pay my new employees to learn the language for the first few months? Learning my code (which is always hard no matter what the language) is already going to be a problem using something that nobody knows just makes it worse. Will your language optimize well? C++ being everywhere means that compilers vendors have put a lot of effort into writing good optimizers. When performance matters C++ will often come in first because of this effort.
- guenthert 7y ago
  I read the suggestion as being about a new syntax for the existing language C++. For that you'd need 'only' a transpiler (and syntax high-lighter in your favorite support tools), quite possibly written in a readily available language, perhaps even C++. That should address your concerns regarding availability on various platforms and optimization. Your other concerns of course stand. I, for one, find different languages with similar appearance needlessly confusing. I what the experience with different syntaxes for the same language would be.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  In other words it's the same network effects that weigh down any attempt at creating a new ecosystem. So if you're going to do that, you may as well start from scratch and do things better from the get-go.
mamcx 7y ago
> Can we design a language (cpp-prime?) I dislike, a lot, the C family of languages. I wish that the pascal or oCalm have "won". But being practical, we are stuck in this reality, so: Is not "we". Is "them". I think only IF the core developers of that languages provide the "blessed" syntax it could actually catch up. What I have wondered is why C/C++/JS not provide a "clean up" forward policy. I think all involved are smart enough to see what is wrong with that langs (we always know what suck of what we build with time). Then say: "This is $IDEAL-C we will targeting. This will fix this list of problems, and maybe this other list, BUT... $IDEAL-C is a in-progress. Each change is iterative, and will deprecate in steps. $BAD-C will be continued to be develop. $IDEAL-C transpile to $BAD-C. $IDEAL-C is another file extension. It will keep the same $IDEALS of $BAD-C. Eventually, $IDEAL-C-STEP-1 will replace $BAD-C and become $BAD-C. And that until we reach $IDEAL-C! " I know this look like what modern c/c++/js is doing, but the trouble is that that are additive changes. That mean triple work: Keep with $new, still have the problems of $old and maintain $both stuff at the time. What is lacking is doing subtractive changes and REMOVE what is wrong. The key is transpiling, and not change the core tenants of the lang (ie: C stay as a razor edge). The big problem, probably, is to not do drastic paradigm changes (ie: turn C in a functional lang), instead, clean the lang until is like what a good, idiomatic, modern developer of it will use. I think is doable to make $IDEAL-C/C++/JS to be near identical to most developers and from a distance, not look different at all. Being progressive and in steps, provide auto-tranforming tools along the way and I think the community will move on. I have see, partially, the idea applied with C#, so I think is doable? P.D: Probably $IDEAL-C must only fix a very small list of stuff, initially. For example, lets say "Remove dangling IFs from C. END" That its. This small-scope is I think, the key to make the experiment worthwhile.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
There's not really a need anymore, because LibClang[1] has solved the parsing problem. Historically it was really hard to write tooling (syntax highlighters, static analyzers, scripts to update build dependendencies, etc.) for C++ due to the difficulty of parsing the language. In the past several years, that has completely changed - you just call LibClang to handle the parsing for you, and work with the high-level abstractions provided by LibClang instead of munging the text yourself. There are lots of reasons to want to replace C++, but "it's hard to write a parser" is no longer a relevant one. [1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/Tooling.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/Tooling.html
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  You indeed no longer have to do the parsing, but I've been told that even the AST is a beast because the language is so complicated. Corner cases abound. (Note: Have not used libclang myself, but I look at clang ASTs on godbolt from time to time).
_bxg1 7y ago
C--

saagarjha 7y ago

jstimpfle 7y ago
C has its own parsing problems.
- eru 7y ago
  Yes, though I don't think it's undecidable to parse.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

In theory that's D. D was designed to be easier to parse than C++, for example, it uses Foo!Bar and Foo!(Bar, 4) template syntax rather than Foo<Bar> and Foo<Bar, 4>. On the other hand, it still uses templates and supports mixins (basically #define on steroids), so while it's easy to parse, large chunks of code don't exist until compile time so can't be indexed by IDEs perfectly.

pjmlp 7y ago
And as much as I like their community, I feel it already lost its spotlight opportunity, due to their lack of manpower vs other languages offerings and continuous improvements. Even if C++ is a little baroque, C++17 and now C++20 provide many of the D's benefits, while keeping all the libraries, and finally we are getting Java like C++'s tooling to just throw it away.
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  > due to their lack of manpower vs other languages offerings and continuous improvements No. D failed due to a mandatory GC and the 'two standard libraries' idiocy.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Plenty of GC enabled system languages have proven their value, up to building full stack graphical workstations, so far they just lacked somg big corp political and monetary willingness to push them down the anti-GC devs no matter what. Thanfully with the likes of Swift on iDevices, Java/Kotlin on Android (with an increasingly constrained NDK), COM/UWP über alles + .NET on Windows, ChromeOS + gVisor, Unreal + GCed C++, those devs will have a very tiny niche to contend with. I give it about 10 years time, for pure manual memory management to be like Assembly and embedded development.
    - jstimpfle 7y ago
      > I give it about 10 years time, for pure manual memory management to be like Assembly and embedded development. For someone who has spent some time thinking about memory management strategies, manual MM isn't actually that much additional work. By far, most code doesn't allocate or free (and that's a good thing). So MM->GC is hardly like Assembly->Compiler. In Assembly you're constantly allocating and pigeonholing, and you can't have nice names for things. Assembly->Compiler is a huge step compared to MM->GC, and GC can cause a lot of headaches as well. (disclaimer, I've done almost no assembly at all).
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        On single developer projects as long as one doesn't stay too much away from them, scale it up to multiple sized distributed teams, add binary libraries, and you end up with double frees, leaks and ownership issues all over the place.
        gpderetta 7y ago
rienbdj 7y ago
Not quite, because D brings many other things. I mean something that is equivalent to C++, with all of the same semantics, but a less ambiguous grammar.

pjmlp 7y ago

It is called Ada.

choeger 7y ago
Take an upvote!

xiphias2 7y ago

Rust seems to be the most successful zero-overhead language competitor to C++, though it's far not as mature as C++ yet.

jokoon 7y ago
Rust has a high learning curve (borrowing, etc). Rust is a competitor to ADA, not C++. You can certainly ask developers to write things in rust instead, and even progressively rewrite codebase in rust since it's compatible with C++, but a language is about adopters, and ease of learning for beginners and students.
- carlmr 7y ago
  Counterpoint, when you write C++ you need to think about borrowing without the compiler telling you when you're making a mistake. Rust in that sense is easier than C++.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Only if you are not using a recent version of clang or VC++. CppCon 2019: “Lifetime analysis for everyone” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d67kfSnhbpA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d67kfSnhbpA It is available to play on Godbolt.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  To compete with Ada, Rust needs to offer something like SPARK, binary libraries, Ada like IDEs, real time specification, and most important certified compilers.
- unrealhoang 7y ago
  Counterpoint, Rust is actually easier to learn, and take way less time from inception to writing production-ready code.
  - jokoon 7y ago
    even the tutorial says that borrowing has a high learning curve

gpderetta 7y ago

You could, but the incompatibility is not necessarily worth it. There was some talk to take advantage of the transition to modules to be able to mark translation units as implementing a specific version of the standard (I think rust doese something similar) to allow for backward incompatibile Evolution of the language. The committee doesn't seem to keen because they fear the language fragmenting and from a more practical point of views we will be still #including legacy code into new modules for at leas a decade (and I'm probably wildly optimistic).

gmueckl 7y ago
With the glacial pace in which new language features are picked up by users of C++, I'd be surprised if modules have significant adoption in the first decade after C++20. It'll probably take at least two to three years to get stable support in most of the tooling and then anther couple of years until people start to believe that they are battle tested enough.

fanf2 7y ago

Damian Conway has a couple of papers from 1996 suggesting a better syntax for C++ http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/#Human_Factors_in_Programming_Languages http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/#Human_Factors_in_Pro...

oblio 7y ago
You know your proposal failed when there's people born back then that have just finished college this year and they still won't be able to use the changes you proposed ;-)

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

Oh, you haven't read this classic paper? http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/PDF/ModestProposal.pdf http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/PDF/ModestProposal.pd... "We describe an alternative syntactic binding for C++. This new binding includes a completely redesigned declaration/definition syntaxfor types, functions and objects, a simplified template syntax, and changes to several problematic operators and control structures. Theresulting syntax is LALR(1) parsable and provides better consistency in the specification of similar constructs, better syntacticdifferentiation of dissimilar constructs, and greater overall readability of code."

etalian 7y ago

I wondered the same a while ago, and it turns out you can, in fact to test this hypothesis I ended up implementing such a language myself. The resulting syntax can express every construct from modern C++, is fully LALR(1) (no ambiguities and no vexing parses), has fewer keywords and is in general shorter than the equivalent C++ code, and once you know the syntax it is (subjectively) easier to read too (no spiral rule for example). Plus of course it can fully interoperate with existing C++. Have been waiting to make it open source until I have finished writing the user manual (aiming for the end of this year), if that's interesting to you I post updates about it on twitter at cigmalang.

zamadatix 7y ago
Do you have any examples of the syntax?

BubRoss 7y ago

I say it all the time here, but there was a cool language called clay which was a great redesign of C with modern C++ techniques. It is not kept up anymore. It has an elegant design that, while not perfect, has a lot to offer. http://claylabs.com/clay/ http://claylabs.com/clay/

bluGill 7y ago

There are been hundreds of attempts using a number of different ideas. The reason for C++ and not those alternatives is there is a lot of C++ code. If most of my code is C++ I don't gain anything from your new language as I spend most of my time maintaining old code. Even if I use your language for new code that means I constantly have to remember if I'm fixing a bug using C++ code rules or the new language rules. Some projects have successfully done this and eventually re-wrote everything. However others have not and the pain of a new language is a problem. The other problems with that approach means C++ is everywhere. I know that I can find a good compiler for C++ when I want to switch platforms. Will your new language support my new platform? Will your new language even exist? I've worked on a number of projects where the code was written in some language where the compiler vendor is out of business. This risk works against all new languages (some have overcome it, some have not). With C++ I know if I need to hire more people I can hire experts to help out. If I choose your language do I have to pay my new employees to learn the language for the first few months? Learning my code (which is always hard no matter what the language) is already going to be a problem using something that nobody knows just makes it worse. Will your language optimize well? C++ being everywhere means that compilers vendors have put a lot of effort into writing good optimizers. When performance matters C++ will often come in first because of this effort.

guenthert 7y ago
I read the suggestion as being about a new syntax for the existing language C++. For that you'd need 'only' a transpiler (and syntax high-lighter in your favorite support tools), quite possibly written in a readily available language, perhaps even C++. That should address your concerns regarding availability on various platforms and optimization. Your other concerns of course stand. I, for one, find different languages with similar appearance needlessly confusing. I what the experience with different syntaxes for the same language would be.
_bxg1 7y ago
In other words it's the same network effects that weigh down any attempt at creating a new ecosystem. So if you're going to do that, you may as well start from scratch and do things better from the get-go.

mamcx 7y ago

> Can we design a language (cpp-prime?) I dislike, a lot, the C family of languages. I wish that the pascal or oCalm have "won". But being practical, we are stuck in this reality, so: Is not "we". Is "them". I think only IF the core developers of that languages provide the "blessed" syntax it could actually catch up. What I have wondered is why C/C++/JS not provide a "clean up" forward policy. I think all involved are smart enough to see what is wrong with that langs (we always know what suck of what we build with time). Then say: "This is $IDEAL-C we will targeting. This will fix this list of problems, and maybe this other list, BUT... $IDEAL-C is a in-progress. Each change is iterative, and will deprecate in steps. $BAD-C will be continued to be develop. $IDEAL-C transpile to $BAD-C. $IDEAL-C is another file extension. It will keep the same $IDEALS of $BAD-C. Eventually, $IDEAL-C-STEP-1 will replace $BAD-C and become $BAD-C. And that until we reach $IDEAL-C! " I know this look like what modern c/c++/js is doing, but the trouble is that that are additive changes. That mean triple work: Keep with $new, still have the problems of $old and maintain $both stuff at the time. What is lacking is doing subtractive changes and REMOVE what is wrong. The key is transpiling, and not change the core tenants of the lang (ie: C stay as a razor edge). The big problem, probably, is to not do drastic paradigm changes (ie: turn C in a functional lang), instead, clean the lang until is like what a good, idiomatic, modern developer of it will use. I think is doable to make $IDEAL-C/C++/JS to be near identical to most developers and from a distance, not look different at all. Being progressive and in steps, provide auto-tranforming tools along the way and I think the community will move on. I have see, partially, the idea applied with C#, so I think is doable? P.D: Probably $IDEAL-C must only fix a very small list of stuff, initially. For example, lets say "Remove dangling IFs from C. END" That its. This small-scope is I think, the key to make the experiment worthwhile.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

There's not really a need anymore, because LibClang[1] has solved the parsing problem. Historically it was really hard to write tooling (syntax highlighters, static analyzers, scripts to update build dependendencies, etc.) for C++ due to the difficulty of parsing the language. In the past several years, that has completely changed - you just call LibClang to handle the parsing for you, and work with the high-level abstractions provided by LibClang instead of munging the text yourself. There are lots of reasons to want to replace C++, but "it's hard to write a parser" is no longer a relevant one. [1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/Tooling.html https://clang.llvm.org/docs/Tooling.html

MauranKilom 7y ago
You indeed no longer have to do the parsing, but I've been told that even the AST is a beast because the language is so complicated. Corner cases abound. (Note: Have not used libclang myself, but I look at clang ASTs on godbolt from time to time).

_bxg1 7y ago

C--