[TUHS] Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2025 at 07:00:03PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2025, at 6:16???PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > We did that with https://www.little-lang.org/index.html which is a compiled
> > C like language.   There are a ton of extensions to C that just made sense
> > to me.  It never caught on but it still stands as an example of how you 
> > could take C syntax and extend it to be more useful.  Why people don't 
> > do that is a mystery to me.
> 
> I looked at it when it was mentioned in the past. Didn't like it enough.

Yeah, it has no traction, I don't blame you in the slightest.

> Anyway, my main point was that please do something innovative and
> interesting if you must use a new HLL for an OS! 

So little-lang wasn't for OS stuff, it was for userland, but I feel it was
plenty innovative.  It fit into C syntax but added a bunch of useful stuff.
string type that managed the memory in the language, no more malloc/free
crap.  Case statements that could take variables, regexp as switches.
Perl like I/O with regex built in.  It was just a pile of pleasant
enhancements to C.

And it could be an OS language, I don't see why not.

If I had enough money, I'd fund a gcc --lang=Little syntax and the world
would be a better place.  In.  My.  Opinion.  Not everyone elses but I
really believe if gcc had that dialect a lot of C people would move to it.

I'm not pushing my pet language, I'm holding it up as an example of how
you could make a new programming language.  Take what works, extend it
with what works.  Preserve people's knowledge rather than force them to
learn a new syntax that does the same thing.  Extend rather than replace.