I do not know of any languages that support this idea but I just thought that since numbers are just bits, why should we not be able to access those bits directly? In most languages such as C or C++, to manipulate bits, one must use bitwise logic, confusing to some people. Related Stack Overflow ...
Effect systems (aka algebraic effects), IMHO, are a pretty powerful construct that can be used to model various kinds of patterns which traditionally require "dedicated" features to express, such as error handling, asynchronous programming (through, e.g., async/await), etc.
However, their adoptio...
This means variables can't be overwritten, arrays can't be modified, and nothing can be modified "in-place" - a new variable has to be created. Or if you need to modify it with a loop, then you would need recursion or foldl/similar.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of complete immutabili...
Some languages such as Java and C# are not only object-oriented, but only (in another sense) object-oriented. They require object-oriented programming. All must be part of a class.
Some simple programs are procedural by design, such as command line tools. And requiring a class for the program doe...
Vectors can refer to either expandable array data structures of elements, for example std::vector, or to a SIMD vector type, which is typically fixed-sized and permits one instruction to act on all of the values at once.
What should vectors refer to? Ambiguous tags are frowned upon. My vote is us...
Several languages have a function or macro to indicate that a certain point in control flow cannot be reached, even though the compiler cannot statically prove it, such as unreachable!() in Rust and __builtin_unreachable() in gcc.
However, some languages don't have this. Even Swift, which borrowe...
In Java, checked exceptions are well-known to be extremely unergonomic, to the point that many people circumvent them.
Evidently, checking exceptions, if done properly, can lead to a more robust code—which is an excellent advantage. Rust's approach using Result, though not an exception, shows thi...
Certain constructs or conditions in programming just are not allowed. Languages such as Java or Swift handle these by raising an error when encountered. C and C++ on the other hand say 'Anything could happen, might error, might work, might work some of the time.'
What are the advantages of leavin...
A lot of languages have some form of constant variables - hell, even JavaScript has them.
Yet python doesn't. What possible benefits does this have for the python language?
Some languages allow you to write something like
x, y, z = (1, 2, 3)
Which is equivalent to
x = 1
y = 2
z = 3
What are some of the syntax constructs that exist that perform variable destructuring/unpacking?
So I was considering making a better version of Scratch, because I started my programming hobby using it. However, as it stands, Scratch is unsuitable for usual programming, mainly because it's intended for young kids, but event-based programming has stuck with me. Programming with events in Pyth...
Because a bare function object might not have constant time complexity, and because the function object might be called with the same argument repeatedly, I thought it might be good to cache its outputs. This is possible if the function has equality-comparable domain. Let me illustrate by a C++ c...
Designing and implementing a programming language (and maintaining it) is a lot of effort, so there must be a good reason to make it worth doing. Other than "just because I can", what is people's motivation to do it? Are existing (common) languages maybe not performant or concise enough for certa...
This question is related to, but not the same as, What are some ways of reporting compilation errors? as that questions gets into the design of handling compiler errors at the compiler level (and the answer there gives personal examples of their approach to handling them). This question is more o...
I just noticed an answer that has been in the First Answers Queue twice. I have not seen this on other sites such as Stack Overflow before. Why is this site able to have First Answers enter the Queue multiple times?
There are coding languages (such as C, C++, Dart and JavaScript) that use brackets to wrap for loops, while loops, functions and other elements, like this:
function {
stuff
}
while (something) {
stuff
}
But there are also languages (Python) that don't use brackets, like this:
function:
...
What are some factors that determine what features get built into the language itself and which ones get implemented in the standard library.
For example instead of macros Zig has comptime feature that allows codegen like implementation of arbitrary arity functions while being native Zig code and not some separate macro language.
What to focus on when creating a programming language: the performance or the readability?
In a lot of modern languages (primarily Python), asynchronous functions (those that return coroutines) must be explicitly marked as such:
async function foo():
pass
Is there any specific reason for this, and if so is there a way to avoid it?
It looks like one user was awarded the silver code-golf badge twice at the same time.
Their badges page also shows the badge being awarded twice:
This looks like a bug. It could be that Lyxal messed something up by traveling in time to get it twice, but if it's happened to others, it may need t...
In Rust, structs and enums may implement any number of traits, which specify certain functions. When a struct/enum implements a trait, this is where the functions are defined:
impl Foo for Thing {
fn bar() { ... }
}
This allows one type to implement two or more traits with methods with confl...
