Re: Feature freeze imminent

On 2007-02-22, Renee Klawitter <[email protected]> wrote:
> Perhaps you can list your planned features somewhere and others might
> take over ? 

TODO.riot

> Would like to myself, but I lack the time, C skill and determination
> for that; what I've thought of after looking over your code some time
> ago was a C++ port/rewrite 

Rewrites: lame, for kids with a lot of time in their hands.

C++: *yuck*. Too complex beast. There are four essential features
that would make C much less painful, only of which C++ does have,
and even it comes with too much complex baggage:

  1. subtyping, i.e. the basic mechanism for the type system
     to understand inheritance. Would rid object-style C code
     from lots of ugly and unsafe casts, and make object system
     far nicer to use.

  2. Tagged unions/algebraic data types/pattern matching. So you
     can have stuff like:

	data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a

	...

	case x of
	    Nothing -> No parameter set
	    Just y -> Woot! Parameter set.

     This would again rid C code of many unsafe C unions and other
     hacks for unspecified parameter and so on.

  3. Multiple return values for functions.

  4. Function closures/first class functions. Hmm... might demand
     a garbage collector for safe _and_ convenient implementation. 
     In any case, they're an essential feature of a language nice 
     to program in.

I think the first two and maybe the third are featured in some C 
derivatives that still remain "low-level" languages...

-- 
Tuomo