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The Ć Programming Language
- dmitrykan 5y agoThanks for sharing! The practical value of such languages could be to build an interlingua and support Python->Ć->Go. The question is: if Ć->Python works seamlessly, how easy it is to make the opposite translation? For instance, take some code that uses external library, like spacy. If this becomes ever possible, it is going to be revolutionary.
- yeputons 5y agoVery and very hard if you're aiming for readability. Ć should be "intersection" of all supported languages in a sense, so it does not support features unless all targets do. For Python that would be dynamic typing. Of course, it's possible to introduce a type like 'any' which can refer to any object, but then you essentially get untyped Ć which results in untyped Go. Which is not really Go anymore, it's more of a Python interpreter.
- dmitrykan 5y agoThanks! One practical target I imagine having is: 1. write the program in Python. 2. translate it into Ć ("interlingua") 3. compile Ć into Go -- for instance there is a belief around me, that Python is not suitable for web scale loads, while Go is more suitable. Go source code / binary in this case are of less importance for code readability, because they are meant for production deployments. Something that happened in GWT: write in Java, compile into JavaScript.
- nephanth 5y agoThis really makes me think of https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- amir734jj 5y ago+1 for the clean handwritten parser.
- jdc 5y agoif the author gets this polished enough, it could be a _fantastic_ bindings generator!
- jacquesm 5y agoWas that a pun?
- arakageeta 5y ago* CORBA flashbacks *
- smackeyacky 5y agoShudder. Thanks for reminding me of that hellscape :-(
- vincnetas 5y agoas i understand author is Polish so not sure if this is joke or not :)
- yeputons 5y agoTake a look at SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator), WebIDL and similar projects. There are binding generators of all kinds.
- etaioinshrdlu 5y agoI'm a little unclear on whether this just produces programs that leak memory when using the C target. Are there any samples of what the generated code looks like in various languages? I would also like to suggest a project name change as soon as possible.
- geenew 5y ago'see programming language' would be more searchable, and would illustrate one use-case for the project (write some code, see what it looks like in a bunch of C-esque languages). Also, you could make jokes about the holy see programming language.
- etaioinshrdlu 5y agoHoly see would get confused with HolyC tho: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:HolyC https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:HolyC
- geenew 5y agoI'm suggesting that just 'see programming language' be the name, but references to it as the holy see could cause confusion. Something like the great schism of programming languages :)
- goldenkey 5y agoRIP Terry Davis. What a titan among men. He belongs up there with the likes of John Carmack.
- goldenkey 5y agoIt's really sad he's gone, TempleOS was such a cool 64-bit operating system. It's unfortunate he got bullied so much that it ended up taking him away from us. People can be so mean :-(
- 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mastrsushi 5y agoA text processor written in C#, GROUNDBREAKING!
- earthboundkid 5y agoRegistering Ç and Č trademarks now.
- jefftk 5y agoBetter intro: https://github.com/pfusik/cito/blob/master/ci.md https://github.com/pfusik/cito/blob/master/ci.md
- bmn__ 5y agorecorded talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uj4G6XlQcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uj4G6XlQcY
- dang 5y agoChanged above from https://github.com/pfusik/cito https://github.com/pfusik/cito. Thanks!
- imhoguy 5y agoStill I find the https://github.com/pfusik/cito https://github.com/pfusik/cito simpler to explain what it exactly does with the short example. @pfusik please maybe put that example also in `ci.md`.
- dataflow 5y agoAlso see: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/
- kjgkjhfkjf 5y agoIt would have been nice to see the compiler implemented in the language itself. I'm a little skeptical of any language that can't be used to compile itself.
- pfusik 5y agoI'd like to rewrite cito to Ć at some point. One problem is that it's written in a fairly recent C#, so either Ć would need to catch up with two decades of C# development or the codebase be downgraded to an older language. And we all use JavaScript NOT implemented in JavaScript. ;)
- kjgkjhfkjf 5y agoI'm a little skeptical of JS too!
- williamstein 5y agoThe compiler is implemented in the language itself.
- rodorgas 5y agoIt seems to be written in c#.
- binarynate 5y agoIt’s implemented in C# (e.g. CiParser.cs)
- singularity2001 5y agoOther than being hard to achieve (often being a secondary goal), Julia gives very good reasons why not to strive for this goal: it may influence the language design in undesired ways, e.g. By removing the focus from high-level features to low level system design features
- ufo 5y agoI wonder how it deals with the lack of a garbage collector in C and C++. I could only find a single paragraph about it in the language reference and it doesn't seem to explain how to free memory in C, or how to deal with circular references in C++. > Memory management is native to the target language. A garbage collector will be used if available in the target language. Otherwise (in C and C++), objects and arrays are allocated on the stack for maximum performance or on the heap for extra flexibility. Heap allocations use C++ smart pointers.
- not2b 5y agoEvidently reference counting is used for C and C++, which means that circular references won't be collected, but in the absence of cycles everything is cleaned up.
- jkaptur 5y agoI’m a huge fan of projects like this (and Haxe) that compile to readable code in the target language. I think they should be a standard tool that people reach for whenever they’re writing logic (as opposed to plumbing). I think they’re challenging to popularize, though, because people already like their favorite language and love all its unique features, while these projects need to be a lowest common denominator by definition.
- stolen_biscuit 5y agoCool idea, I like languages that compile down into C/C++ (like Nim), leverages the ubiquitious nature of C compilers across multiple platforms. Are there any samples of the final sources? It says it's designed for library development, but if there's a error/bug in the generated code am I actually going to debug and parse it effectively? Generated code may be "readable" but it is it understandable? Or am I going to have to try and fix it in the original code (which may be difficult to pinpoint the source of the error if context is lost during compilation)
- eru 5y agoThanks to LLVM compiling your language via C seems to have plummeted in popularity somewhat. It used to be a somewhat popular option for Haskell as well.
- pjmlp 5y agoAnd Eiffel, which uses a JIT based VM for development and then compilation to native code via the platform C or C++ compilers.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago> Are there any samples of the final sources? Have a look here: https://github.com/pfusik/datamatrix-ci https://github.com/pfusik/datamatrix-ci
- forgotpwd16 5y agoThose aren't samples of the final sources. It's a C-acute program, that output a library in the various languages, and example sources that make use of that output. Although there's usually no reason committing an output, this case is probably an exception.
- pfusik 5y ago> Are there any samples of the final sources? https://github.com/pfusik/cito/issues/21 https://github.com/pfusik/cito/issues/21 I generally check-in just the Ć source and not the translations, but if you want a quick look at the generated C code, here's some: https://sourceforge.net/p/asap/code/ci/master/tree/asap.c https://sourceforge.net/p/asap/code/ci/master/tree/asap.c > if there's a error/bug in the generated code am I actually going to debug and parse it effectively? Generated code may be "readable" but it is it understandable? I had no problems with that so far. Nim adds a lot of boilerplate code in C output. cito sometimes adds a few lines here and there, but mostly it looks like the code you would write directly.
- travisgriggs 5y agoDid anyone else scroll their screen up and down in attempt to get rid of the dust more above the C?
- danmur 5y agoI tried to wipe it a few times.
- zmix 5y agoWill be difficult to search for on Google.
- ncmncm 5y agoGood prank. Anyway I hope it's a prank.
- junon 5y agoWhy?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 5y agoI’m fascinated when one domain wanders into the expertise of another. In this case branding. I bet Ć has some fantastic technical ideas and may be a powerful tool. But how much does it limit its own future just by having a name that isn’t distinguishable in speech from a much larger brand? Though this makes me rather curious about products that succeed despite their branding. What happens if we make an unpronounceable language and it takes off? Would it just be given a de facto name by the community?
- oefnak 5y agoC-accent?
- cjfd 5y agoMore like C-acute. C-accent would be C' which, I am sure, will be invented at some point in the future or past.....
- singularity2001 5y agostill waiting for c-grave č also know as crave
- avgcorrection 5y agoĆ is C-with-acute-accent. C' is C-with-apostrophe.
- singularity2001 5y agoapparently Cito (pronounced cheato?) but I'm not sure about the rationale
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tasogare 5y agoSimilar to C-dièse, the way some French are saying C# based on how it's written.
- 0xmarcin 5y agoLooks like the parser is hand crafted using recursive descent method: https://github.com/pfusik/cito/blob/master/CiParser.cs https://github.com/pfusik/cito/blob/master/CiParser.cs I did not look closely but writing parser without any tooling is asking for troubles, from parsers that enter infinite loops to not handling parse errors properly. ANTLR is way better for writing parsers for simple languages.
- junon 5y ago> I did not look closely but writing parser without any tooling is asking for trouble Says who?
- aerovistae 5y agoI sat here trying to scratch the accent mark off my screen for a minute.
- xerox13ster 5y agoI have to admit I scrolled to see if it was on my screen or the character.
- pindab0ter 5y agoThere are more languages and ways of using the Latin script than just English. Many languages use diacritics.
- forgotpwd16 5y agoA language "meant for implementing portable reusable libraries". Seems like a nice idea.
- junon 5y agoNot a new one. https://haxe.org https://haxe.org.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago"Haxe can build cross-platform applications." Although it also has APIs as an example use case, it is more general.
- junon 5y agoHaxe compiles to a bunch of languages. It's the same thing, just with a fleshed out standard library.
- gregopet 5y agoIn this part of the world the name would be quite political. We only use the letter Č (pronounced as ch) but our neighbors also use Ć (pronounced the same, only softer.. it's literally called "the soft Č"). There are a lot of 1st/2nd/3rd generation immigrants from those countries and their last names almost always end with Ć. So "he/she has a Ć" became a rude way of saying "he/she is an immigrant". And spelling someone's name with a Ć when it's actually Č can result in a very heated argument. I have no doubt you could find developers who would refuse to work with Ć :)
- badloginagain 5y agoHonestly as good as most of the excuses I've seen for "Reasons I won't work with _____ langauge"
- singularity2001 5y agoDoes that result in the cito => cheato compiler for ć?
- drno123 5y agoI guess you are from Slovenia :)
- sime2009 5y agoWhich part of the world is "this" part of the world you are talking about?
- mimac 5y agoProbably Slovenia.
- 6ue7nNMEEbHcM 5y agoAny hints of where that part of the world is to avoid it? I suppose Czech Republic?
- shp0ngle 5y ago
- nkssy 5y agoI wonder how hard to get it to output lua code? I have a set of runtime environments that only support lua but this Ć language looks interesting. Obvious aside: I do agree with the many others that the funky line accent above the C doesn't help with typing during either discussions or searching, I'd expand the name purely for clarity. This isn’t actually bikeshedding - a name is used many many times in many contexts. It matters.
- yalok 5y agoReindexing array accesses by +1 in Lua would be interesting…
- KronisLV 5y agoNot talking about the interesting naming or the circumstances around this particular implementation, what do the people on HN think about the concept of such transpilation? I recall taking a course in university about model driven programming - the idea of creating an abstract representation of logic, interfaces and other system components and then generating either full implementations or stubs in multiple languages was an interesting one, even if implementations were really hard to get right. In practice, i've mostly only seen one language specific model driven design tools, like JHipster (https://www.jhipster.tech/ https://www.jhipster.tech/) or the likes of JPA be reasonably successful, since there's a lot of problems with supporting abstractions across different languages and runtimes, but what has been the experience of others in that regard?
- wheybags 5y agoSuper relevant use case: you are making an app for multiple platforms, say iOS and android. You have some common logic, but for the most part the apps are separate, native apps. This would let you write the common part once, without needing to do something like drop down to c++ and then do native interop from swift and Java.
- KronisLV 5y agoIf the logic is standalone (e.g. algorithms, data structures, validations etc.), then that's indeed a really good approach! But in my experience, you oftentimes have to work with libraries and ecosystem components which are platform dependent. In those cases, the cross platform code would only work when these ecosystem components are also written in that particular language. Now, it can work with Xamarin Forms, React Native or similar technologies with very specific use cases, but it feels like any other, more generic attempts at getting something like that working are doomed to fail (e.g. when you don't have a cross platform solution in place, for example, different ways to access DB on different platforms, or different ways to make web requests etc., or even interact with device capabilities or handle permissions).
- skohan 5y agoI feel like this is a use-case which sounds a lot better on paper than it actually is. Mobile apps in my experience tend to be shaped quite heavily by the system API and UI frameworks they are built on top of. When you talk about the "common part", usually this is like the networking layer and models maybe, which tends to be very simple and takes like a half hour to write in the first place. Even if there is a little duplicate work, it's still better to have the whole app implemented in the native language and frameworks, rather than having some odd bits which don't work with the same tooling for example and are harder to debug.
- tluyben2 5y agoDoes it have a Linq equivalent?
- kaba0 5y agoPerhaps it could be used as a semi-fair language benchmarker. I would like to see the benchmark game where every implementation is through this language.
- pfusik 5y agoYes, benchmarking is interesting. I will post benchmarks of different target languages.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoAll: I understand that when a post like this shows up, everyone's first reflex (including mine) is to react to the name. However, reflexive reactions like that tend to be shallow and to lead to boring, generic discussion. Here we're going for reflective discussion, not reflexive—which takes longer but ends up being less predictable and therefore more interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... The idea here is to let the quickest, shallowest reactions go, and wait for the more interesting ones to show up. With a post like this one, that would mean focusing on the details of the language. It's not that names are irrelevant, but we shouldn't focus on the surface at the expense of the depth—doing that leads to exciting-in-the-short-run, but boring-in-the-long-run results. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Ndymium 5y ago"Optional (but recommended) UTF-8 BOM." Why? Everyone else I've seen is not recommending the BOM and trying to get rid of them. They cause issues in various systems and you could just infer UTF-8 from the file extension.
- pfusik 5y agoThere are still many Windows programs that default to current Code Page instead of UTF-8. I prefer to have the encoding explicit in the file contents rather than rely on some external file type configuration. This is just a loose recommendation, cito does accept files without the BOM.
- tialaramex 5y agoBut are these "many Windows programs" appropriate ways to edit code in Ć ? It seems to me that if you say Ć program text is UTF-8 then that is an explicit encoding, and that if you feel it isn't explicit enough, an actual way to write out the encoding unambiguously is needed instead, which a BOM doesn't provide. I am a little concerned by the wording "cito does accept files with the BOM". The BOM was chosen because it's a zero-width non-breaking character and so doesn't really mean anything, if cito thinks it means something, that's likely to be a problem elsewhere. For example if I concatenate two related Ć files, that ought to be fine, but I wonder if there's a BOM in the second file its presence in the middle of the concatenated file causes trouble.
- pfusik 5y agoLet's discuss it in https://github.com/pfusik/cito/issues/30 https://github.com/pfusik/cito/issues/30
- htk 5y ago...it solves one specific problem: how to write code that can be conveniently used from C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift and OpenCL at the same time. Super interesting. Could something like this be created for declarative UI paradigms like SwiftUI and WPF?
- laurensr 5y agoI wonder how networking is handled. For example reading/writing data from/to UDP/TCP socket can be a whole lot different in e.g. C# and Java.
- Aeolun 5y agoThis is made to compile to a bunch of targets, presumably to make things easier, but then literally the first thing they do is just explain exactly how many inconsistencies there are in their number and array logic between platforms, and that it’s up to you to keep track of that.
- thih9 5y agoIs there a demo showing Ć code and output generated for other languages?
- DonHopkins 5y agoI had a quick reflex reaction akin to reverse peristalsis to Bjarne Stroustrup's paper "Generalizing Overloading for C++2000" when I first saw the title then read it, until I finally realized he wrote it on April 1. https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf >Generalizing Overloading for C++2000 >Bjarne Stroustrup, AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ, USA >Abstract: This paper outlines the proposal for generalizing the overloading rules for Standard C++ that is expected to become part of the next revision of the standard. The focus is on general ideas rather than technical details (which can be found in AT&T Labs Technical Report no. 42, April 1,1998). >Introduction: With the acceptance of the ISO C++ standard, the time has come to consider new directions for the C++ language and to revise the facilities already provided to make them more complete and consistent. A good example of a current facility that can be generalized into something much more powerful and useful is overloading. The aim of overloading is to accurately reflect the notations used in application areas. For example, overloading of + and * allows us to use the conventional notation for arithmetic operations for a variety of data types such as integers, floating point numbers (for built-in types), complex numbers, and infinite precision numbers (user-defined types). This existing C++ facility can be generalized to handle user-defined operators and overloaded whitespace. >The facilities for defining new operators, such as :::, <>, pow , and abs are described in a companion paper [B. Stroustrup: "User-defined operators for fun and profit," Overload April, 1998]. Basically, this mechanism builds on experience from Algol68 and ML to allow the programmer to assign useful - and often conventional - meaning to expressions such as double d = z pow 2 + abs y; >and if (z <> ns:::2) // … >This facility is conceptually simple, type safe, conventional, and very simple to implement. At least I'm not the only one who fell for it: https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/g/std-proposals/c/uTOtGMYyJEo https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/g/std-proposals/c/uTO...
- yalok 5y agoI wonder what it takes to add output to Rust, or if that’s even possible…
- brianguertin 5y agoAlso see Kotlin: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html In Kotlin you can write a library usable from C/C++/ObjC/Swift/Java/JavaScript.