Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming languages

"Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson" <johann@2ndquadrant.com> wrote in message
>>>Personally, I'd say there's been precious little new in programming
>>>languages since Simula gave us OOP in the late 1960s.


> Another limiting factor, not readily apparent to North Americans: the
> English language. Most, if not all, programming languages applied world
> wide are based on English, with keywords in English.


Programmers don't seem to care to have keywords in their native language.
And many languages already make it possible to define aliases for keywords;
it just doesn't seem important.


> What happens when you're no longer restricted by the ASCII character
> set? Expand that to: What happens when you're no longer restricted by
> Unicode and can invent your own notation and symbols at will?


With Unicode, you have the situation that many identical glyphs have
different character codes, creating problems with different identifiers that
look exactly the same. And with no restrictions on what can appear, with
hundreds of obscure symbols, what could source code end up looking like?


And what is there beyond Unicode? Source code created as a bit-image - in
colour - being fed to a compiler? Good luck with that.


> What happens when you get to define your own keyboard layout? Put the
> new symbols anywhere you want.


You can invent all the new symbols you like. But you've then created your
own language and your own tools. Then you swap computers with someone else
who's created their own set of symbols and a different layout...


But perhaps this is from the point of view of a language designer rather
than an individual programmer.


> And while you're at it, develop an interface with automatic indentation,
> code completion and if possible, refactoring. Try to make that
> interface independent to the compiler. Does it help this tool if you
> add metadata to your object files beyond the regular debugging symbols?


This sounds more reasonable. But I suspect such interfaces already exist..


> [If you think English is wordy, you must not know any French, Spanish,
> or Italian, all of which are far wordier. ... -John]


Or German. Or Finnish. Practically any language based on our alphabet.
--
Bartc

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