Pretty.c

Creating DSLs within C has a long tradition.<p>Stephen Bourne wanted to write his shell in ALGOL so badly that he relentlessly beat C with its own preprocessor until it began to resemble his preferred language.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuhs.org&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;utree.pl?file=V7&#x2F;usr&#x2F;src&#x2F;cmd&#x2F;sh&#x2F;mac.h" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuhs.org&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;utree.pl?file=V7&#x2F;usr&#x2F;src&#x2F;cmd&#x2F;sh...</a>

Can someone clarify whether this is intended as a joke or whether the author is actually confused? I mean, nothing about this makes sense: it&#x27;s not &quot;scripting&quot;; it claims to introduce &quot;strong typing&quot; while it does nothing about typing; it introduces all kinds of operator aliases &quot;modeled after Lua and Lisp&quot; that are present in neither of these languages. But it&#x27;s not an obvious parody either, so I&#x27;m genuinely not sure.

It claims to be a scripting language but you still have to compile the programs. Boo! Add CINT (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;root.cern.ch&#x2F;root&#x2F;html534&#x2F;guides&#x2F;users-guide&#x2F;CINT.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;root.cern.ch&#x2F;root&#x2F;html534&#x2F;guides&#x2F;users-guide&#x2F;CINT.ht...</a>) and you can have instantaneous execution and even a REPL!

&gt; Provide so much syntactic sugar as to cause any C developer a diabetes-induced heart attack.<p>Haha love this!

Well, there&#x27;s a few things I should probably get around to adding to CNoEvil[0] and ogw[1]... There always seem to be more every few months when this project reappears.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~shakna&#x2F;cnoevil3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~shakna&#x2F;cnoevil3&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~shakna&#x2F;ogw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~shakna&#x2F;ogw</a>

For what it’s worth this makes the same mistake that Python 2 did: string and bytes are not the same type and shouldn’t be treated as such.

Reminds me of a C++ codebase I once had to inspect that was entirely written as if it were written in Java. With camelcase naming for everything, getters and setters for every class variable, interfaces everywhere.

If you find this interesting, you might like libcello.h aswell! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.libcello.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.libcello.org</a>

Type names are nice; Perfect choice for the in-built func macros (like min); Len -- love it. Named boolean operators -- might be a bit much but go for it; Ternaries are illegible so you can only improve them; Not completely sold on all your loop definitions but some make sense to me; Resource tracking is impressive; The for... look a bit ugly -- could probably call it something else.<p>All in all: quite a solid attempt. I&#x27;ll give you 8&#x2F;10 for the design of this. The way you sketched this out in C using macros is really elegant. This actually looks like good code. Would I use it? It&#x27;s a new language and I like C already. It could help people learn C and think about language design. Since the way you&#x27;ve done this is very clear.

&gt; ifnt for if(!...).<p>&quot;unless&quot; seems more readable than &quot;ifnt&quot;.

Is it possible to tangle the Readme into pretty.h? In other words, are the codeblocks in the orgfile exhaustive.<p>I love the literate way you have explained your thought process in the readme.

I have not decided how I feel in general, but:<p>&gt; Everyone defines these, so why not provide them?<p>Honestly, that&#x27;s fair.

&gt; turn any codebase into a beginner friendly one<p>Okay then.<p>I was hoping to see a “this is just for fun” disclaimer but didn’t see one. Please never actually use this in a project that other people will have to read or contribute to.

Wow, neat! The wildest part to me is<p>&gt; And it’s backwards-compatible with C and all of its libraries!<p>I can&#x27;t wait to give it a shot! This looks like a riot.

This project looks really cool! Unfortunately, there’s just way too much magic involved. In my humble opinion, C is simply not the language for this level of magic—extreme use of macros (and hidden behavior in general) is how you end up with hard-to-detect (and hard-to-debug) bugs and security vulnerabilities. As cool as this project looks, I’d never feel comfortable using it in anything serious. A+ for the effort though!

All that is missing is a garbage collector. Should be possible to implement one by overriding malloc &amp; friends?

Being able to control indents for a particular case { right-aligning variable names - while keeping &quot;=&quot; in line can be useful for instance }... Is the perfect example of why indenting should be left for the eye of the reader not the computer.<p>It&#x27;s exactly why I find python code difficult - nay impossible - to read at times.<p>So you are really doing absolutely the opposite of what you are claiming...<p>Obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder - but the one thing that C got right was using &quot;{&quot; &amp; &quot;}&quot; to specify code flow.

&gt; if (argc above 1)<p>I give up.

This is terrifying

This should have been invented 50 years ago!

I feel compelled to try it out in a serious way and contribute to it. I have strong knowledge of python and am learning C. Are there good reasons -apart from attracting the ire of c-programmers- to not use it?

I&#x27;m reminded of the guy who did<p><pre><code> #define BEGIN { #define END } </code></pre> and a whole bunch of other macro-larkey just to make C look more like Pascal. Only then would he deign to code in it.

Evil, yet beautiful. Hats off to you.

Does &quot;strong typing&quot; now just mean &quot;static typing&quot;? Afaik both lua and python are already strongly typed. Javascript is not and I have no clue about ruby.

`equal(0.3, 0.2 + 0.1); &#x2F;&#x2F; true`<p>how is this wizardry possible?

This made me immediately think whether MIT Loop of Common Lisp was an inspiration here. Checked the user&#x27;s profile and sure enough, a lisper!

The code asumes that C17 has C++-style auto (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aartaka&#x2F;pretty.c&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;pretty.h#L118">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aartaka&#x2F;pretty.c&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;pretty.h#L11...</a>), it does not (in C auto is storage specifier that is equivalent to no storage specifier).

For each looks convoluted, you shouldn’t have to list the type.<p>It should be no harder than C#’s foreach(var i in list)

Sorry for what is probably a stupid question. Does pretty.c act as a preprocessor or sorts, converting your pretty.c script into actual c, that is then compiled? Or is it a virtual machine that interprets your pretty.c script?

I&#x27;ve seen this implementation of defer a few times now. I really dislike calling this defer (like the keyword in Go) as the given code won&#x27;t be executed on return.

This reminded me of ArnoldC<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lhartikk.github.io&#x2F;ArnoldC&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lhartikk.github.io&#x2F;ArnoldC&#x2F;</a>

I’m waiting for someone to write a lambda calculus based C++ library that allows everything to be defined in terms of function. Peano axioms and all.

That is pretty cool

I feel like this would have been cool 25 years ago

Given the title, shouldn’t that be #include &quot;pretty.c&quot; instead of #include &quot;pretty.h&quot;?

&gt; The goals for Pretty C are:<p>&gt; Provide so much syntactic sugar as to cause any C developer a diabetes-induced heart attack.<p>:-D

&gt; Deprecate Lua, Python, JavaScript, Ruby and a dozen other languages, because Pretty C is the ultimate scripting language, but lightning-fast and strongly typed!<p>Umm… that’s quite the goal.<p>I’ll stick with deprecated Python.

I cannot wait to show this to a colleague of mine. He will kill me XD

&gt; max and min of two numbers.<p>Influenced by windows.h I see :)

as someone that just started C, it looks pretty :)

This is as horrific as it is wonderful.

Are variadic macros turning complete?

love. It.

does this transpile to C or how does it actually work?

Or just use Ruby.

someone&#x27;s salty about tiobe!

So sweet :))

Can we just pascal?

Meta: the naming is ... strange.<p>The actual name of the repo is &quot;pretty.c&quot;, but the name used for the language&#x2F;dialect&#x2F;result&#x2F;horrorshow[*] is &quot;Pretty C&quot;.<p>The actual code file you include is called &quot;pretty.h&quot;, which makes sense since it&#x27;s a header, of course. Confusing!<p>Edit: escapes.<p>[*] Yes, I&#x27;m a C programmer, currently hunting for black-marked insulin to combat the rapid-onset diabetic attack from all that sugar. Sorta.