Re: Looking for new language features (re-elaboration)

Dear Newsgroup


Thanks for all the ideas and feedback. What I am really after, and the
fault is mine for not being more detailed in my original post, is
higher level features / semantics / control structures / data types /
language elements or whatever that make it "easier to program".


I accept fully arguments such that PL/1 (which I have never used) and
C++ (which I have) already have too many features, and I accept there
are arguments either way that it may be useful to extend languages
with more spohisticated preprocessors. Although these arguments are
important, they are beside the point of my original post.


What I am asking is, if we concern ourselves only with the general
meaning and operation of the higher level features, without undue
concern as to how they are implemented, is it possible to conceive of
new language elements that help us write software? For example most
people would accept C / Pascal have "higher level" features than
assembler, because you can write expressions without breaking
calculations up into separate opcodes, you don't have to worry about
function entry/exit code etc. Are there even higher level features
that we could put into a new language that would produce a similar
order of improvement?


Or are there "wish lists" of things that people would like to see in
langauges? Again I realize you can't design a language just by joining
up lots of nice features, and I realize the harder task is to make the
features work together properly. But this post is about looking for
ideas, not implementations.


Finally thanks again to the moderator and those who replied -
comp.compilers is as always a well-run and informative news group!


All the best
Bill Rayer
[It depends on your application. I find perl vastly more productive than
C for most of the programming I've been doing lately because it has built
in garbage collected arrays, lists and strings, hash tables, pattern
matching, and a module system that's made it possible for people to write
a vast library of useful application libraries. -John]

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