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The Bosque Programming Language

microsoft.com

31–40 of 172 posts

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#32

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

Hi Mark! What's this language's purpose and how will it be better at that than existing languages?

The current purpose is explore language design choices and their impact on their general utility for programmers and enabling automated developer tools (like verifiers and compilers). The hope is to use Bosque as a proof of concept for various ideas.

Some examples of better than existing languages are included as case studies in section 5 of the technical report:

-Automatically finding (ideally) any runtime error and producing a test case for it.

-Verifying that a SemVer update is safe or flagging where it will change the behavior of your code.

-Supporting compilation to high speed SIMD code or other accelerator architectures.

This is all still an aspirational goal and a lot of work remains though.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#33

> Thus, Bosque does not have any undefined behavior I think this is the one that should be highlighted most. Otherwise, from an engineering perspective, many of the other language features have already been implemented and widely used in other languages

I think I remember someone talk about undefined behavior in specifications and how it is actually a good thing, in the sense that offers increased liberty for implementations and some other advantages. Anybody else has heard this? Don't quite remember where I read it.

My humble opinion aligns with yours, it seems intuitively "better" to have no undefined behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undefined_behavior#Risks

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#34

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

Could you comment on how you came up with the name, or its meaning?

Bosque is spanish for "forest" (not necesarily along a river).

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#35
post #27

A random thought about the code samples. What do we gain from having to write point instead of other languages' point.y = value ? I believe that syntax should be designed to make things simple for developers, not for the designers of languages or for compilers.

"point.y = value" is typically a statement for a single update of a mutable record.

I'm not sure how you'd extend the latter to support the features of the former. The meaning is completely different. Different things should look different.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#36
Am I the only one who really can't stand the expression "easy to reason about"? Everywhere you look everything that isn't exactly CORBA, ASN1., EJBs or XMLs is E2RA...

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#37

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

Hello, no offense but the community here is bikeshedding. I'd suggest you to discuss this at /r/programming

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Mark! What's this language's purpose and how will it be better at that than existing languages?

The current purpose is explore language design choices and their impact on their general utility for programmers and enabling automated developer tools (like verifiers and compilers). The hope is to use Bosque as a proof of concept for various ideas. Some examples of better than existing languages are included as case studies in section 5 of the technical report: -Automatically finding (ideally) any runtime error and…

> -Verifying that a SemVer update is safe or flagging where it will change the behavior of your code.

Isn't that similar to what Elm does?

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#40
post #35
post #27

A random thought about the code samples. What do we gain from having to write point instead of other languages' point.y = value ? I believe that syntax should be designed to make things simple for developers, not for the designers of languages or for compilers.

"point.y = value" is typically a statement for a single update of a mutable record. I'm not sure how you'd extend the latter to support the features of the former. The meaning is completely different. Different things should look different.

I think this is nicely solved in Swift.
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