Algebraic Data Types for C99
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Algebraic Data Types for C99
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Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#2Definitely looks nicer and probably works better than my older attempt [1], but uses 8x more code and depends on the awesome but kinda scary Metalang9 macro toolkit. I think libsum is a good intro if you want to see how algebraic data types work underneath.
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#3One of the crimes of modern imperative programming languages is not having ADTs (except maybe Rust) built-in. It is such a basic mental model of how humans think and solve problems. But instead we got inheritance and enums which are practically very primitive.
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#4This is the work of a wizard.
I've known C for almost 20 years, and never would I have thought the macro system was powerful enough to allow such black magic.
This is awesome!
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#5Interesting.
Algebraic Data Types are almost always one of the things I miss when I use imperative languages. I have to do Java at work, and while I've kind of come around on Java and I don't think it's quite as bad as I have accused it of being, there's been several dozen instances of "man I wish Java had F#'s discriminated unions".
Obviously I'm aware that you can spoof it with a variety of techniques, and often enums are enough for what you need, but most of those techniques lack the flexibility and terseness of proper ADTs; if nothing else those techniques don't have the sexy pattern matching that you get with a functional language.
This C extension looks pretty sweet since it appears to have the pattern matching I want; I'll see if I can use it for my Arduino projects.
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#6One of the crimes of modern imperative programming languages is not having ADTs (except maybe Rust) built-in. It is such a basic mental model of how humans think and solve problems. But instead we got inheritance and enums which are practically very primitive.
Zig is a modern imperative programming language with ADTs: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Tagged-union
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#7Interesting. Algebraic Data Types are almost always one of the things I miss when I use imperative languages. I have to do Java at work, and while I've kind of come around on Java and I don't think it's quite as bad as I have accused it of being, there's been several dozen instances of "man I wish Java had F#'s discriminated unions". Obviously I'm aware that you can spoof it with a variety of techniques, and often en…
Sealed interfaces in java 21 allow pattern matching
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#8Interesting. Algebraic Data Types are almost always one of the things I miss when I use imperative languages. I have to do Java at work, and while I've kind of come around on Java and I don't think it's quite as bad as I have accused it of being, there's been several dozen instances of "man I wish Java had F#'s discriminated unions". Obviously I'm aware that you can spoof it with a variety of techniques, and often en…
Sealed interfaces in java 21 allow pattern matching
Yeah I know, we just don't use Java 21 at work yet. I'm super excited for that update, and it actually looks like we will be transitioning to that by the end of the year, but I haven't had a chance to play with it just yet.
I do find it a little annoying that it's taken so long for Java to get a feature that, in my opinion, was so clearly useful; it feels like they were about a decade later on this than they should have been, but I'll take whatever victories I can get.
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#9One of the crimes of modern imperative programming languages is not having ADTs (except maybe Rust) built-in. It is such a basic mental model of how humans think and solve problems. But instead we got inheritance and enums which are practically very primitive.
Yeah, when I first learned Haskell a million years ago, and Erlang slightly less than a million years ago, the pattern matching was so plainly obviously the "correct" way to do things; it just felt like it was exactly how I thought about problems, and all the constructs with if/switch/enums had been an attempt to force my brain thinking into something that executes.
It honestly does annoy me that a lot of mainstream languages still haven't really adopted ADTs; when Java 8 added a lot of (well-needed) new syntax, it felt like that was an ideal opportunity to add ADTs and pattern matching (though I'm sure that was easier said than done).
Re: Algebraic Data Types for C99
#10One of the crimes of modern imperative programming languages is not having ADTs (except maybe Rust) built-in. It is such a basic mental model of how humans think and solve problems. But instead we got inheritance and enums which are practically very primitive.
I've never written Swift, but it seems like they have it too https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...
I also would love a future where ADTs are more common in imperative languages