Thursday, June 10, 2010

The Unbearable Simplicity of C

Ponder that one of the most, if not the most important programming language today, "C", doesn't have a module system.

Consider this in light of Linus' statement that "C is a largely context-free language. When you see a C expression, you know what it does. A function call does one thing, and one thing only".

And Dave Moon, in the Arc Suggestions, says on module systems: "A C-like convention with prefixes on symbols, all my symbols are named moon-xxx and so forth, would almost be workable" (my emphasis).

So if your goal is a worse-is-better language and deep integration with the most important platforms today, POSIX and C, which is my goal, maybe your language doesn't need a module system either.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And this is why I use C.

The same interfaces are exposed lexically, at the API level, and at the ABI level.