“Programming Languages” Tagged Pages

Dictionary-Enabled Racket Support for Emacs

Written on Friday, August 23, 2013

For the last month or so I've found Racket programming even more enjoyable than before. The reason for this is a tool named Ractionary (short for Racket Dictionary Generator), which I wrote for extracting information about Racket language names. Said information can easily be used for setting up some Racket language awareness for Emacs. There is an Emacs tradition of running an external Lisp (or "inferior Lisp") process to allow for dynamic evaluation of foreign (non Emacs Lisp) code, and this kind of a solution could be used to query information known to Racket on demand.

Let Us Have More C++ Languages

Revised on Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Created on Friday, January 7, 2011

C++ is a good language in that it is widely supported and has a large ecosystem around it. As a result, it has a large number of libraries, including extensive cross-platform frameworks (such as Qt). There are also entire operating systems written in C++, of which Symbian is an example. All of this provides ample motivation to use C++ (or at least its libraries) from time to time. However, as a language C++ can feel verbose and constraining at times.

Rascal Mode for Emacs Released

Written on Monday, October 8, 2012

During the last year or so I've written some program transformations in the Rascal programming language. I find it beneficial to have an Emacs mode for any language I make significant use of. Not finding an existing one for Rascal, I proceeded to put one together myself. See Emacs Mode for Rascal (on GitHub) for the code. The mode has its imperfections. Rascal is not exactly a small language, and while it has a C-like surface syntax, there is some unusual syntax that seems tricky to get right.

Ideas for Language Constructs Implementable by Translation to Readable C++

Last modified on Thursday, March 17, 2011

This is a collection of ideas of what one might do with technology that makes it easy to add language constructs to an extensible language (closely related to C++) that targets readable C++ source code. The C++ compatibility and readability constraints restrict the language, for sure, but many interesting things can still be done, and barrier for adoption is low, especially when the compiler is used merely as a one-off code generation wizard.