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From: bart <bc@freeuk.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: do { quit; } else { }
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2025 22:24:03 +0100
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On 11/04/2025 19:29, David Brown wrote:
> On 11/04/2025 18:56, bart wrote:

>> That's not right. You pasted part of 6.7p1. The full syntax for 
>> declarations comprises all of 6.7.p1, plus 6.7.1p1, 6.7.2p1, 6.7.2p2 
>> (constraints to do with the ordering of long, int etc), 6.7.2.1, 
>> 6.7.2.2, 6.7.3, 6.7.6, 6.7.7, and 6.7.8.
>>
> 
> It is the full syntax for declaration specifiers - the matter under 
> discussion.  I did not include initialisation, static assertions, the 
> syntax for identifiers, or any number of different parts of the syntax 
> of C.

So how much of:

   long unsigned const long const const typedef int A;

does it cover? I can see that it doesn't cover any of the terminals (all 
tokens up to 'A'); the identifier ('A'); or the semicolon.

I suggest there's more missing that you seem to think.


>> I could spend all day showing absurdity after absurdity in C. And 
>> you're saying /my/ language is a toy?!
> 
> Yes.
> 
> It is a toy because it is a personal little language for your ego. There 
> is no specification or description of it, there are no serious 
> implementations of it, there are no users of it other than you, there is 
> no consistency in it - you change your language and your tools to suit 
> the program you are writing at the time, and regularly don't know 
> yourself how it works or what features it has.  It is in no sense 
> "battle-tested" - the only user writes code that he knows will not cause 
> trouble.  Thus you avoid all the issues that real languages have to 
> handle - real programs written by many different people for many 
> different purposes.

Yes, it is partly experimental. But how does that invalidate the 
usefulness of a particular feature?

How does that invalidate its sane left-to-right type syntax compared to 
the nightware syntax that C uses?

Even an experimental language can throw up dozens of useful features and 
improvements.

'Battle-testing' is more useful for getting solid implementations, 
finding bugs, filling in patches in coverage. But I am not providing an 
implementation, only ideas and comparisons of language features.

You were talking about named arguments, well here is how /my/ version 
works (which i first tried 30 years ago); here is the benefit of my 
experience; here is how I solved the same problems you might have.

My language has been in use for over 40 years, and it has been 
self-hosted in a continuous chain over the same period. That's some toy.

It has also managed to evolve a lot more than C has, BECAUSE there are 
few users and there is a small codebase.




> You are like an Esperanto fanatic trying to tell people their language 
> is so much better than English because the spelling is consistent, so 
> the world would be a better place if we all switched over.  Except in 
> your case, you are the only one who speaks the language.

(Huh. I grow up, in the UK, in a family and circle of relatives where we 
spoke our own obscure dialect from a region of Italy. We seemed to get by.)

Computer languages are different: if you have a compiler for a private 
language, then it can do anything. Plus it is possible to write 
conversion programs to advantage of tooling available for the more 
mainstream language.


> I have never heard of anyone other than you who views cdecl as a 
> necessity.  A tiny proportion of C programmers find it helpful when 
> dealing with code written by others - especially if the code is written 
> in a poor style and the reader is relatively new to C.

Rubbish. Everyone finds C declaration syntax a nightmare.