Useful stuff

A Thought…

People are stupid. Period. Every day I look at the humanity around me, and I am astounded that so many people managed to remember to keep breathing through the night, much less be able to tie their shoelaces in the morning.

— Phil Perry

Useful stuff

Posted on 2021-Mar-21 at 11:41:23 by Phil
Last update on 2022-Jun-20 at 00:28:00 by Phil

Things that would be useful to see in a language.

A common idiom is looping “forever” (well, practically you need to exit that loop at some time).

forever { ... }

instead of

while (true) { ... }

The idea is that the keyword forever stands out more obviously to the reader, making it clearer what’s going on. In a language like C, you could define a macro forever to be replaced by while (1). Either way, the compiler should be on the lookout for perpetual loops, and check that there is a path out of it (some sort of accessible break; somewhere). Not finding a way out should be a warning, not an error, as there is GUI code which loops forever.

Posted on 2023-Jul-03 at 14:30:00 by Phil

An interesting discussion…

A (somewhat heated) discussion over multi-pass compiling versus single-pass (à la Turbo Pascal) and the distinction between that and multi-pass parsing.