[TUHS] roff(7) [ and other related stuff ]

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Jan 01, 2022 at 08:47:11PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> >If you think any of those other languages remotely approach the elegance
> >of C, I just don't know what to say.
> 
> This.
> 
> I think it blends terseness, cleanness, simplicity and ease of use in just
> the right quantities in a way no language before or since has really been
> able to muster.  Its only real weakness to me is that it isn't very good at
> string handling (the reason I sometimes kitbash stuff in BASIC still).

Function pointer decls drive me nuts.  

I agree with the string stuff, any scripting language handles that for
you behind the scenes.  C could add a String type that did all of that.
We did that by hand in BitKeeper and it worked great, it is completely
doable.

All of the warts aside, you could take C and extend it to do a bunch
of useful stuff and still have it be C.  We tried with little-lang.org
that is very C like but has almost all of the scripting goodness that
tcl has exposed in a C like way.  Check out the switch statement.
Check out regexp.  It's just part of the language, it is not function
calls.  Very pleasant and easy to use.  little as a programming 
language is pretty dead, but as a proof of concept, it should be
very much alive.

If I had more money, cough, Rob, Google does, I'd fund a dialect of C
that had all the C goodness and mixed in the right amount of scripting
goodness.  I'd come out of retirement to work on that.  And I say that as
this guy: http://mcvoy.com/lm/boat who is going out on the ocean tomorrow
for crab.  I love my retirement, I fish all the time, 60+ times per year,
I'm really not interested in going back to work.

But if someone threw a bunch of money at a team of people who wanted
to make C as fun as Perl (or Python, I get it, Perl isn't cool any more
but I loved the usefulness), I'd like to be Rob and Ken for that project,
this is a giant overreach but I think I could bring taste to that project.
If that ever happened, I think a lot of people on this list and elsewhere
would like the result.