Re: Idle musings on doing E over again

On Sep 28, 2012, at 10:44, Dan Bornstein wrote:

> — but I was (and am) utterly dissatisfied with the prospects of exploring this territory using any of the existing higher-level tools and languages that I researched. My dissatisfaction stemmed from issues along the lines of too many dependencies, poor semantic fit for the problem, and philosophical incompatibility.

Can you say something about what tools you researched? Should I pursue this work, I will of course need to choose a platform to start prototyping from, and it would be nice to reuse some research even if the results are negative.

> One thing that I feel is important at this level is an integral
> parsing facility that can be used to write understandable code, and so
> the prototype includes syntax for PEG grammar specification. (In a
> way, this is a decades-overdue acknowledgment that Snobol had the
> right idea here.)

Parsing should be in the standard library. I'm not sure that a particular parsing technique should be built into the *language*. In E, we have quasiliterals (which I would keep nearly as-is in this hypothetical E-rev-2), which can be used to embed arbitrary little-languages; this is how I would embed a parser (a grammar) in a program. (There's actually a yac

> Another high-order bit for me is avoiding gratuitous dependencies.
> Getting to a self-hosted system seems pretty sensible to me, but I
> don't want to have a ton of prerequisites for getting to that point.

I don't care for working with self-hosting-only systems because I want to be able to take it apart and change everything and not have a bootstrapping problem.

> Though Kevin's and my short- to medium-term goals are probably
> different, I think he is sensing the same underlying need in the
> world. And I'll disagree, and take the stance that inventing a new
> language *is* inherently good, and I want to help make it easier to do
> so. Wish me luck!

I wish you luck.

Wish me sufficient free time!

-- 
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>