[Datadraw-user] New DataDraw computer language - Grail

[<dat...@li...>]

Hi, all.

It's the holiday season, and once again work has backed off long enough
for my head to become full of all the cool stuff I wish I had time to
do.  This time, it's yet-another-computer-language... again.

Grail will have these three major goals:

- Foster extreme code reuse
- Run much faster than C
- Compile to both software and hardware

Grail will be motivated by Python, Verilog, and of course DataDraw.  The
name is from the movie "Monty Python and the Holly Grail."

If anyone is interested in a discussion of Grail features, motivations,
etc, and has time to kill over the holidays, feel free to join in here.

Some cool stuff I'm envisioning in Grail include:

- DataDraw-like data structures, with the speed that goes with it
- Powerful "reuse" capability - I'll attached examples
- Extensible syntax - Grail will parse itself and anything else
- Verilog-like structural hardware/software description capability

Most of Grail will be written in Grail, including most of the stuff
DataDraw generates today.  Syntax for relationships, for example, will
be in a library, not in the language.  If you still want to use DataDraw
generated data structures with C, there will be virtually no changes -
DataDraw database files are legal Grail code, and will still compile to
database.c and database.h files like before.  However, all that code
DataDraw creates with code generators today will instead just be in much
simpler and more extensible and maintainable Grail libraries.

I often get excited about my projects.  However, this time the pieces
seem to be falling in place in an elegant powerful way.  Check out the
examples to see how well the "reuse" construct works, and compare this
to C++ templates, which can't even embed the next pointer of a linked
list in the child objects.  Compare the beginning of a reusable graph
module to the C++ Boost Graph Library.  I'd say the Grail code will be
an order of magnitude simpler and clearer.  I've also attached a circuit
description for a FIFO, though some syntax issues still have to be
resolved.

Anyone up for some holiday brainstorming on Grail?

Happy holidays,
Bill