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pike is based on LPC which stands for "Lars Pensjö C" which was developed in 1989. at the time C dominated the language landscape. sufficiently popular alternat
by em-bee 2y ago
pike is based on LPC which stands for "Lars Pensjö C" which was developed in 1989. at the time C dominated the language landscape. sufficiently popular alternatives were BASIC, pascal, lisp, smalltalk, TCL and perl. i don't think there was much else. at least in the unix world. lars probably was familiar with C and that's what he based the language on. i think python was really the first non-C-like language that became very popular.
i am not a fan of the C syntax myself, but at the time, i was mostly familiar with it, and i wasn't even considering the idea that there could be a better syntax.
later though i did develop a preparser that would allow me to write pike in a python like syntax. it was a hack made as an april fools joke. but it was actually working. it was called nessie.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoI guess the other well-known syntax form at the time was the one in the Algol/Pascal/Ada/Modula-2 tradition with keywords (begin/end, if/endif, etc) for structuring blocks and that's what MOO cribbed from, while LPC (and later JavaScript, Java, etc.) did the braces thing. At the time I liked braces a lot more but since then have come around to preferring the more Wirth-ish style. I think Julia has shown that a dynamic lisp-ish language can do this very elegantly.