[osflash] New Language RFC

[Cortlandt Winters]

Very fun topic,

In order of crazy expansion.

Some very concrete things that I really like are the way that in python it
does pattern matching on your arguments to a function so it doesn't matter
what order they are in. And I really like the constraints in lzx. I'd
personally love to see statecharts integrated into a language as a core
feature rather than a library. I'm not an expert in it, but I'm comfortable
in it and do generally like ML. It's the only functional language that I've
liked reading the syntax of.

one thought that has often crossed my mind woud be some of these techniques
combined to do something like the python argument pattern matching on larger
program chunks. Maybe by unifying feature terms.
http://www.notebookmargins.com/ref/Computer%20Science/tree_automata_techniques.pdf

A couple of more bizarre concepts are to base a languages syntax on it's own
set of unicode glyphs with strokes and colors that represent their place in
the grammar. Such language would probably really want this keyboad that I am
really looking forward to that someone bloged about not long ago.
http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/ but if the language were cool
enough stickers would do the job too. :D

Also there is a book and some techniques by masaru tomita based on a graph
structured stack(designed for parsing natural language) that I think seems
like it would provide some unique notions of what a programming grammar
might look like.

In general, I'd like to create grammars easily and use them easily in
programs.

Implicit event bubbling is important.

I really liked a language called toolbook written in the early 90's because
the code could be written to read like a natural language.

"to handle buttonclick send rotateview to gyro and put green key into first
word of second paragraph of table layout"

That's not all actual code but it gives you an idea of how you could get it
to read. There were a lot of nice natural language analogs of syntactic
rules (object is a noun, method is a verb, property is an adjective) and it
could read like poetry. As a fun experiment try and think of what some of
those structures in the code above might mean.

Thanks for asking!

-Cort

On 10/27/05, Nicolas Cannasse <ncannasse at motion-twin.com> wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> The new still-unamed language specifications have been updated at
> http://ncannasse.free.fr/files/flexible.html . It now includes
> enumerators,
> Dynamic type parameters and a beginning of grammar rules.
>
> I would like to get comments about the design of the language : what are
> the
> features you've been dreaming about ? How should look for you the language
> you'll be happy to write in everyday at work ?
>
> It's an open discussion, so bring your ideas in . I have my own ones, but
> I
> think opening the design to everybody will result in a better result in
> the
> end.
>
> Have fun !
>
> Nicolas
>
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