Interesting-c

I'm creating a new programming language!

This language will be created through transcompilation to C. Inspired by the concept of CoffeeScript, and including a lot of Python philosophies and ideas, I will try to create a language which is really easy to use, and yet fast as C.

One of the most important features will be reflection and metaprogramming facilities. This will help developers by describing the structure of their programs at runtime. This makes for good ORM's, serializers, etc.

It will not use classes for encapsulation, but instead a new concept I have created. It will build upon the capabilities of classes and the concept of "is-a" relationships. More on these soon.

interesting-c aims to be able to interpret 99% of existing C programs as interesting-c. So a C program will (almost) always be a interesting-c program. This allows developers to convert gradually to interesting-c.

interesting-c will have a module system. modules will be able to import other modules as well as pure C source or header files. The syntax will be something like this:

    import "c_module.c";
    import icmodule;

When importing, interesting-c will just add a #include directive to the compiled source, but it will simulate the concept and behavior of a namespace. It will parse the #included file and look for identifiers which the current module can use. Optionally, users will be able to use import module_name as alias syntax to assign the module to an identifier so its namespace can be isolated from the local module namespace. This poses a new problem: C has no concept of a namespace and will not allow the programmer to choose between foo in module1.c and foo in module2.c. It's unclear how I will solve this

interesting-c will discourage (but still support) preprocessor directives. But there will be a lot more space for safer, more interesting pre-compile-time magic as well as runtime magic. And yet, you will still be able to shoot yourself in the foot and use macros as much as you want.

Early work

I have started creating interesting-c, and it really gives me new interesting problems to solve.

I am using PLY (python-lex-yacc)'s lex to create the lexer. My challenge right now is to preserve whitespace as possible, as well as most of the code appearance, since it's important for the users to be able to opt in and out of interesting-c at any time, so it will be something easy to adopt.

I have been creating small C programs to test C language features. Programs like these help me test whether and how the language supports something.

    /* Test whether floating point numbers can be octal */

    int main(int argc, char* argv[]){
        float oct = 01.1f;
        return 0;
    }