I read somewhere that code-browser was written partly for the purpose of testing the zinc programming language, but what was the original motivation for zinc ?
Also, what techniques do you use for debugging zinc code ? Diagnostic printfs are out as zinc doesn't support variable arguments and debuggers (like gdb) are not very effective as zinc mangles the symbols when compiling to C.
Thanks.
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The original motivation for zinc was to have a language that allows blanks in identifiers because I couldn't decide between camel notation 'myVariable' and underscores 'my_variable'. So now I can have 'my variable' :-)
More seriously I made it because it is fun to write compilers and because I wanted a portable assembler with high level language features such as smalltalk block closures.
It is really hard to debug zinc code, but I am accustomed to mangled names and this encourages me to avoid writing bugs :-)
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Hi Marc,
I read somewhere that code-browser was written partly for the purpose of testing the zinc programming language, but what was the original motivation for zinc ?
Also, what techniques do you use for debugging zinc code ? Diagnostic printfs are out as zinc doesn't support variable arguments and debuggers (like gdb) are not very effective as zinc mangles the symbols when compiling to C.
Thanks.
The original motivation for zinc was to have a language that allows blanks in identifiers because I couldn't decide between camel notation 'myVariable' and underscores 'my_variable'. So now I can have 'my variable' :-)
More seriously I made it because it is fun to write compilers and because I wanted a portable assembler with high level language features such as smalltalk block closures.
It is really hard to debug zinc code, but I am accustomed to mangled names and this encourages me to avoid writing bugs :-)
Yes, it is quite nice to be able to use spaces in identifiers.
Zinc does have a clean syntax.
Any intentions to make zinc a real programming language ?
I have a lot of work to do on this programming language but I don't want to make it a real programming language. It's too much time consuming.
But when I have fixed some inconsistencies and added missing features, I'll release it as an open source project.