Okay, adding #swift Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), which is thread safe, to what my dream #programmingLanguage should have. Compared to Swift, #nim their preferred implementation, ORC, doesn’t leak memory when dealing with reference cycles. Although I don’t know if #nimlang their implementation it thread safe, as well.

Maybe my theoretical #languageDesign should use atomic operations and warn, but leak upon reference cycles. It seems to make the implementation easier but still thread safe.

Thoughts on OCaml, https://osa1.net/posts/2023-04-24-ocaml-thoughts.html.

It hurts but it’s true and factual :-/.

#ocaml #LanguageDesign

I've always considered programming languages to be languages to communicate amongst humans (the computer doesn't care one bit what language it has to parse or interpret).

I was looking for material related to studying programming languages as natural languages, but couldn't find much besides people strongly arguing that programming languages are geared towards the computer and not humans.

Any less narrow-minded views out there?

#linguistics #programmingLanguages #languageDesign #programming

On a hunch, I went back and checked some 2000 C source files that I wrote over 30+years for instances of 'abs' that should have been 'fabs'. To my embarrassment, found more than 20 instances.

That could explain quite a few frustrating experiences with numerical software, such as improper stopping of iterations.

They could have been detected with the gcc -Wfloat-conversion switch, but it took me a decade or two to learn about it...

☹️ #Programming #FloatingPoint #CLibrary #LanguageDesign

:-)

https://pldb.com/posts/scottFalhmanInterview.html

#LanguageDesign #PLT #CommonLisp #Lisp