ddrone

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Posted in What UNIX shell could have been

If this is something you envision as its own language, maybe instead of having a tag inside string literal itself you can think of using tag prefix before opening quote in literals, like in Python or Scala, so your examples become

  • "foo"
  • f"flag"
  • p"/dev/random"

As about ways to improve shell scripting in general, I have found that for the majority tasks I prefer to use a typed programming language instead. For example, recently I needed a throwaway program to process occurrences of regular expression matches in a bunch of files, which is a task that sounds to be well-suited for a throwaway script. I, however, realized that it would be easier for me to write a program in Kotlin instead, which turned out to be a better choice since it was faster to write because I've had access to IDE with code completion and contextual documentation. The resulting program turned out to be easier to debug as well.

This might not work as well when you want to wire up a bunch of external processes, but I think it should be possible to write a small library of helper functions to make that easier as well.

Posted in An Algoloid that uses macros to define itself

So, consider this thread a failed attempt to open discussion of something akin to a language that lived only briefly in my imagination. Sorry about the noise.

No big deal, the forum isn't particularly high-traffic anyway :)

Posted in An Algoloid that uses macros to define itself

I haven't understood the goal about "using macros to define itself", though I admit I haven't read linked threads in detail. What exactly would be the difference from usual boostrapping?

Posted in Minimal features required for an extensible language

I'm a bit confused about your question, what exactly you mean by "functional environment" in your question? The examples you give are wildly different and do not help to clarify it.

Posted in Who's Around?

Hi! I'm a software engineer not working on anything related to programming languages (unfortunately), but with general interest in them and related topics. I've done a bunch of toy projects involving implementations of programming languages like interpreters, compilers and partial evaluators.

I don't have any relevant side-project at the moment, though I have some ideas I would like to get implemented someday.