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Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)

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Re: Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)

#12

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

tbh I think one of the things I really liked reading through examples was the change in the switch/case behavior. I always thought implicitly falling into the next case was an awful design, and that a break is the more logical implicit behavior except in the case (no pun intended) of stacked empty case statements.

I do all my coding in Python, but if I ever find myself needing to reach for C again, I'll certainly consider this.

EDIT: Though is there a reason why "fn" is needed? I would think the AST builder would still be able to identify the beginning of a function definition without it, and as a programmer, I can identify a function definition easily.

Re: Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)

#14

Post by pixelpoet »

dooglius wrote: post #5

How does this compare to Zig or Odin, which have the same goals of improving upon C and have gotten occasional publicity here on HN?

For one thing, C3 thankfully understands that there are more mathemathical types people are interested in than just ints and reals, for example vectors: https://c3-lang.org/language-common/vectors/

Zig has SIMD vectors, but I frequently need 3D vectors, and refuse to use things like vec3_add(vec3_mul(a, 2), b) etc since I mainly develop 3D graphics software.

Re: Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)

#17

Post by mjburgess »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #12

tbh I think one of the things I really liked reading through examples was the change in the switch/case behavior. I always thought implicitly falling into the next case was an awful design, and that a break is the more logical implicit behavior except in the case (no pun intended) of stacked empty case statements. I do all my coding in Python, but if I ever find myself needing to reach for C again, I'll certainly con…

Things like that make grepping easier. And redundancy of syntax makes reading-without-mistake faster. The more you put on the page the lower the cognitive load, the more spare it has in it, the easier it is to search for increasingly refined contexts of use.

Re: Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)

#18

Post by lerno »

sfpotter wrote: post #16

One thing I just can't understand is proactively using the :: syntax. It's sooo ugly with so much unnecessary line noise. Just use a single period! I think one of the best decisions D made was to get of -> and :: and just use . for everything.

`::` simplifies the module vs identifier resolution.

In C3 there is something called "path shortening", allowing you to use `foo::bar()` in place of something like `std::baz::foo::bar()`. To do something similar with `.` is problematic, because you don't know where the path ends. Is `foo.baz.bar()` referring to `foo::baz::bar()` or `foo::baz.bar()` or `foo.baz.bar()`?

Re: Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)

#19

Post by foul »

sfpotter wrote: post #16

One thing I just can't understand is proactively using the :: syntax. It's sooo ugly with so much unnecessary line noise. Just use a single period! I think one of the best decisions D made was to get of -> and :: and just use . for everything.

I can understand it, I just hate it. I would prefer confusing dots, a module builtin namespace, rebol backslashes, confusing slashes, anything else.
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