Re: A microcontroller-centric, target-neutral programming language

On 15 Jul 2003 23:43:43 -0400, "Pete Gray" <petegray@ieee.org> wrote:


>I'm about to embark on a project to produce a microcontroller-centric,
>target-neutral programming language.
>I'd like to hear views regarding the pros and cons of Industry or Academic
>sponsorship versus the Open Source approach.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>-Pete.
>petegray@ieee.org


Pete,
The key question here is not sponsored vs. open source but rather,
will anyone out there adapt his software process to your language?
There are maybe hundreds of brilliant languages out there with a
zero user base and you will need huge amounts of manpower to
save your language from going down the same road. Not that I
want to discourage you from your task, and I admit that replacing
the C language is a tempting challenge, but the new one needs
to offer some fantastic features to make that sluggish mass of
worldwide software development move.
A new better-than-C language surely must satisfy a number of
regularity requirements that make it
- easy to produce efficient sourcecode from other tools (e.g. state
charts, numeric analysis tools)
- easy to reverse engineer and prove correctness of certain parts
of a program
- easy to retrieve and let slip in meta information about a whole
project so as to make it fit into the larger picture of software
development


While you are in the process of designing the language you will face
the competition of hundreds of C++ developers who will force the
natural evolution of our current C-centered world along their lines.
If you are really serious about this development, I recommend you
try to mobilize a number of enthusiasts maybe over GNU or some other
board which allows free thinking about such radical and new
developments.


regards,
Mark
--
Mark Piffer
MCU and DSP programming & software design

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.