Re: A tiny self-hosting compiler used for teaching

> On 5. Sep 2026, at 17:18, George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:05:06 +0200, Michael Lehn
> <michael.lehn@uni-ulm.de> wrote:
>> The main motivation for A Better C is actually quite mundane. When teaching C,
>> I always found declarations unnecessarily difficult to explain. For example:


>> int *a[10]; // array of 10 pointers to int


>> int (*b)[10]; // pointer to an array of 10 ints
>


>> There is a perfectly consistent logic behind C declarations: you declare an
>> object in a form resembling how it is used. But for beginners this means that
>> they already need to understand operator precedence — in particular that
>> postfix operators bind more strongly than prefix operators — just to read a
>> declaration.


>> I learned Pascal before C myself, and always found Pascal declarations easier
>> to read because you can essentially read them from left to right.


> I also learned Pascal before C, and I always have preferred
> Pascal-like syntax to the line noise that is typical of C. Ironically
> most of my career was spent using C++, SQL and Scheme. ...






Yes, I did totally change the declaration syntax. That is the point. :-)


The two declarations look like this in ABC:




        a: array[10] of -> int;
        b: -> array[10] of int;




Thus, `a` is an array of ten pointers to integers, whereas `b` is a pointer to
an array of ten integers.


The variable name is separated from its type, and the type itself can be read
from left to right. `->` is a prefix type constructor, rather than merely a
replacement for `*` within C’s declaration syntax. No parentheses or knowledge
of expression-operator precedence are required to distinguish the two types.


The same principle also applies to more complicated types. For example:






        f: -> fn();
        g: -> fn(value: int);
        h: -> fn(value: int): int;




declare pointers to functions with increasingly detailed parameter and return
types.


ABC is not intended to suggest that Pascal, Modula-2, or related languages did
not already solve this problem. Quite the opposite: it deliberately preserves
their clearer declaration logic while retaining C-like expressions and a low-
level programming model.

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