Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zinc: a low level language between assembler, C and C++ with Ruby-like syntax

tibleiz.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 51 posts

Re: Zinc: a low level language between assembler, C and C++ with Ruby-like syntax

#2

Post by timrobinson »

This reminds me of a slightly higher-level High Level Assembly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Level_Assembly

Edit: the HLA web site always used to be a decent place to learn assembly language. I don't remember it being so mauve though: http://homepage.mac.com/randyhyde/webster.cs.ucr.edu/index.h...

Re: Zinc: a low level language between assembler, C and C++ with Ruby-like syntax

#6

Post by psnj »

I was surprised by my almost-panicky reaction to seeing:

  Identifiers Can Have Blanks

  open_window_with_attributes(...)
  becomes:
  open window with attributes (...)
I think I actually felt that wrongness in my stomach. Like a more intense version of seeing our corporate network shared drive's files with spaces and parens in them.

I guess I'm old.

Re: Zinc: a low level language between assembler, C and C++ with Ruby-like syntax

#7

Post by scott_s »

psnj wrote: post #6

I was surprised by my almost-panicky reaction to seeing: Identifiers Can Have Blanks open_window_with_attributes(...) becomes: open window with attributes (...) I think I actually felt that wrongness in my stomach. Like a more intense version of seeing our corporate network shared drive's files with spaces and parens in them. I guess I'm old.

I had a similar reaction, and I'm not sure that it's a "damn kids, get off my lawn" reaction. Specifying an unambiguous grammar may be difficult - which implies parsing may become a problem.

An implementation exists, so the author has something working, but I'm wondering how robust the parsing is. I haven't seen many code examples (only short fragments on the page), so I don't know what potential issues, if any, there are. But, this is the sort of thing that could significantly complicate adding new language features that requires additional syntax.

edit: I'm perusing the source for the compiler, which is of course written in Zinc. This code from the main driver of the compiler perhaps gives a better feel for how it may look in practice:

  while i
From an aesthetic point of view, it doesn't look that bad. In this example, I think "is equal", "out filename", "to OS name" and "include path" are all identifiers. But I'm still wondering what kind of parsing and lexing issues that may arise.

Re: Zinc: a low level language between assembler, C and C++ with Ruby-like syntax

#8

Post by Hexstream »

psnj wrote: post #6

I was surprised by my almost-panicky reaction to seeing: Identifiers Can Have Blanks open_window_with_attributes(...) becomes: open window with attributes (...) I think I actually felt that wrongness in my stomach. Like a more intense version of seeing our corporate network shared drive's files with spaces and parens in them. I guess I'm old.

From the article:

"I did this because I hate uppercase characters in the middle of identifiers and I'm too lazy to type shift to get the '_'. In addition, I find it more readable."

just-use-lisp-style-identifiers-then

Re: Zinc: a low level language between assembler, C and C++ with Ruby-like syntax

#9

Post by JonnieCache »

Hexstream wrote: post #8
psnj wrote: post #6

I was surprised by my almost-panicky reaction to seeing: Identifiers Can Have Blanks open_window_with_attributes(...) becomes: open window with attributes (...) I think I actually felt that wrongness in my stomach. Like a more intense version of seeing our corporate network shared drive's files with spaces and parens in them. I guess I'm old.

From the article: "I did this because I hate uppercase characters in the middle of identifiers and I'm too lazy to type shift to get the '_'. In addition, I find it more readable." just-use-lisp-style-identifiers-then

>just-use-lisp-style-identifiers-then

hitting - is not significantly easier than hitting _ when compared to hitting the spacebar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law

Re: Zinc: a low level language between assembler, C and C++ with Ruby-like syntax

#10

Post by jerf »

psnj wrote: post #6

I was surprised by my almost-panicky reaction to seeing: Identifiers Can Have Blanks open_window_with_attributes(...) becomes: open window with attributes (...) I think I actually felt that wrongness in my stomach. Like a more intense version of seeing our corporate network shared drive's files with spaces and parens in them. I guess I'm old.

That strikes me as giving lie to the "Ruby-like syntax" claim; ask a Ruby programmer what that line means and you will not get the correct answer for Zinc.

Actually the connection with Ruby is tenuous anyhow; Ruby and assembler just don't go together. An assembler should produce a very clear one-to-one correspondence of instruction to machine language opcode, pretty much by definition. A high-level language can turn a simple statement into arbitrarily-complicated run-time code, pretty much by definition. Neither of these are criticisms by any means, it's just what they are. There isn't much syntax cross-talk to be had there.

Post reply on HN