HLL design

This is somewhat of a theoretical question for the experts here. Most
of easy to use languages are too slow for any serious computing while
the languages like C and assembly are somewhat of a pain to use. The
key issues that i identyfy as pain include but not limited to,
variable declaration array boundary checking, strict data types
etc. Most can be solved by using extended variables that carry key
information about the data in the variable within the variable, for
example using the 1st byte to designate the data type of a variable,
int, float double etc. using second byte to designate the number of
dimensions in the variable lets say its N, then using N 4-byte
integers to store dimension sizes, and this header is followed by the
data itself.


Now my question is:


Assuming that the system that is to work with such variables is
inteligently designed, do you think it will be significantly slower
than C? Is there a good reason why there is no "efficient" programming
language which uses such or simmilar system to store variables?




Basically i want a programming language which has the speed and
flexibility of C, while user friendlenness of MatLab.




I am thinking about starting a project to write such a language, but
before i imbark of such a great crusade i want to hear what people who
are by far more experienced than me have to say about it?


Is it really impossible to design a compiler which translates higher
level code than C into efficient assembly?

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