C++ has a proposal process for changes to the language and standard library (see also the ISO C++ wiki's page on "How To Submit a Proposal", the Std Proposals mailing list, the list of Standards Committee papers, and the papers repo on the cplusplus GitHub organization).
Programming-language desi...
Many languages have keywords short and int and long and double as their built-in primitive types. C seems to have started this and other languages such as Java followed. In C one of the reasons why this is the case is because CHAR_BIT is not always 8 so building in and mandating fixed-width types...
How could an operator to test if a number is within a lower and upper bound? [SQL seems to have this] as in 10 <= x <= 20. However, if this were to be implemented in a C-style language there would be ambiguity with comparing the boolean/integer resulting from 10 <= x with 20 instead of actually b...
In some languages, the types for numbers, characters, strings, hardware-builtins (e.g. int32x2_t), and FFI types, are all snake_case; while the types for structures and unions are all PascalCase. These include C, C++, Rust, Go, Zig, TypeScript, F#, and Dart. But in other languages, the types are ...
Haskell has a do notation for writing a code that executes in a monad. I've heard that this is sometimes (ab?)used for creating embedded domain-specific languages, but I'm not sure how that works. Do I need to use an existing monad, or create my own instance? What do I need to put in it and what ...
Given that we have quite a few questions asking for possible approaches (e.g. "how to implement", "what syntax options", ...) or considerations (i.e. "advantages and disadvantages of ..."), there are generally going to be multiple possible approaches or multiple considerations, so a comprehensive...
When implementing an interpreter, there is a choice between implementing function calls either by just recursively evaluating the function body in a different evaluation context ─ essentially piggybacking on the host language's call stack ─ or alternatively, by explicitly representing the call st...
Is PLDI going to include specific tags for every programming language?
In a structural type system, a type can be assignable to another type without this relationship necessarily being declared. For example, in Typescript {x: number, y: string} is assignable to {y: string} because it has all of the required fields.
This raises a question of how a field access like o...
One option in Python is the f-string:
f"{a} {b} {c}"
Which is equivalent to:
str(a) + " " + str(b) + " " + str(c)
What are some other options for formatted string literals, and what are their advantages and disadvantages?
There are plenty of libraries out there that provide tools like LL parsers, combinator parsers, ebnf parsers and more. However, these may not always be suited to the grammar of a programming language.
What language constructs/grammar features would create a situation where hand-writing a parser w...
Several languages, such as JavaScript, C#, and Python, have "generator" methods that lazily yield a series of values rather than returning a single one:
function* upToThree() {
for (let i = 1; i < 3; ++i) {
console.log(`In generator, i = ${i}`);
yield i;
}
}
let g = upToThree();
cons...
In my experience as a developer, a single compile error made in a long program can result in a long cascading list of error messages, only the first of which is directly relevant to the solution. For example, consider the following malformed C# program:
namespace Spaaaaaace
{
public static cl...
Rust famously has the concept of ownership vs. borrowing as part of its type system. This allows some level of automatic memory management ─ that is, heap allocations are freed when their owner goes out of scope without being moved to another owner ─ without the programmer having to explicitly fr...
A switch statement, as in languages like C, Java or Javascript, allows branching based on different cases of some value (the "scrutinee"). It's well known that switch statements can be compiled using a jump table, but this relies on the cases all being within a relatively small range of integers,...
Note: fortunately this isn't just my personal opinion, this policy has precedence in the network
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned
In the interest of self preservation, any posts that look like they were written by chat.openai.com or any other cha...
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