Even two decades ago people were trying to radically change C++ into a different language. I feel like a lot of people really need to take a step back and appreciate that their “dream language” is an entirely different language from C++, and trying to mutilate and reconstruct the existing language isn’t going to give them the satisfaction they believe it will.
The lang blocks are an especially strange suggestion. Seems entirely out of scope and just thrown in there because the author thought it would be cute to add (never mind how much that’d probably complicate the compiler for exceedingly little benefit).
Even two decades ago people were trying to radically change C++ into a different language.
A quarter of a century ago, C++ itself being a preprocessor/transpiler was still visible in the rear view mirror, so things might seemed a bit more malleable. That still meant you had a long time of existing code, but template-driven programming was new enough that “now is the time for some syntactic reshuffling” seemed a more viable approach than today, countless C++ standards later.
This proposal didn’t get traction, but Herb Sutter’s cppfront is another resyntaxing of C++ that is getting more attention (Sutter is a prominent member of the C++ community, and member of the C++ standards committee).
Even two decades ago people were trying to radically change C++ into a different language. I feel like a lot of people really need to take a step back and appreciate that their “dream language” is an entirely different language from C++, and trying to mutilate and reconstruct the existing language isn’t going to give them the satisfaction they believe it will.
The
langblocks are an especially strange suggestion. Seems entirely out of scope and just thrown in there because the author thought it would be cute to add (never mind how much that’d probably complicate the compiler for exceedingly little benefit).A quarter of a century ago, C++ itself being a preprocessor/transpiler was still visible in the rear view mirror, so things might seemed a bit more malleable. That still meant you had a long time of existing code, but template-driven programming was new enough that “now is the time for some syntactic reshuffling” seemed a more viable approach than today, countless C++ standards later.
Speaking of implementation, there’s a paper about this, too.
One of the authors is quite (in-?)famous for another alternative syntax.
It says
langis supposed to replace C++extern "C" {}andasm().This proposal didn’t get traction, but Herb Sutter’s cppfront is another resyntaxing of C++ that is getting more attention (Sutter is a prominent member of the C++ community, and member of the C++ standards committee).
https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront
More precisely: he has chaired the committee for the last 22 years.