> From [1]<p><pre><code> The Hello World program: hello.zu:
FUNC Main() int
IO.write("Hello, World!\n")
RETURN 0
}
</code></pre>
> Notes:<p>> ...<p>> The } character is used to end a block. There is no {, we know where the block starts. This avoids useless discussions about where to put the {.<p>Excuse me, WHAT? When I saw the first code snippet I thought there was a typo, but the idea of using an unmatched close brace is so horrifying to me that I really have trouble looking further at this. Oddly the first thing that occurs to me is that in Vim it makes it hard to move between the beginning and end of a block, but I think I can safely assume that the author is fairly familiar with using Vim, seeing as he wrote it.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.zimbu.org/getting-started/hello-worlkd" rel="nofollow">http://www.zimbu.org/getting-started/hello-worlkd</a>
I wonder if the capitalization is required. What modern programming language would require capitalization? I use it in SQL and that makes sense given that SQL is often embedded in other programming language via strings and so the capitalization helps because there are there's no syntax highlighting. But otherwise I don't see the point of it.
> Why Zimbu?
Suppose you want to write a new program, something like a text editor. What language would you write it in?<p><pre><code> It has to be as fast as possible, so interpreted languages are out.
You don't want to micro manage memory, so C is out.
You don't want to require programmers to have a degree, so C++ is out.
You want fast startup and not depend on a big runtime, so Java is out.
It has to run on most systems, anything with a C compiler, so D is out.
You want to have fun making something new.
</code></pre>
What a nice collection of horrible arguments.
Can a language that uses GC (presumably, it says no manual memory management) be used to program an OS? Just wondering...
I think the home page is not very informative as it doesn't really tell me what features are there in this language, but just what it hopes to be. And tbh, from my experience using vim script, knowing its author may scare me away from this...
Safe to say this project is dead? The repo URL given on the website 404s: <a href="https://bitbucket.org/zimbu/zimbu" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/zimbu/zimbu</a>
I like the idea of splitting FUNC and PROC, but still like the idea of enforcing some level purity on FUNCs at least not allowing them to invoke PROCs, but able to invoke other FUNCs.