On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 2:07 PM, David Leimbach wrote:
> Simple can be nice. I happen to like languages with a bit more expressive 
> type systems. Sum types without unions is not something I’ve tried to do 
> before.

Mostly I just use a struct with all the members instead. But you can do a lot 
with a type tag and a cast.

On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 2:40 PM, sirjofri wrote:
> Honestly, I really like typedef and goto, at least the way they are used in 
> Plan 9 code.

As someone once said: "if you want to go somewhere, a goto is the quickest way 
to get there." I can't argue with that. But I haven't used a goto in a long 
time now: see https://xkcd.com/292 :-)
Looking at their grammars, I think Zig has no goto statement! Neither does Rust 
from the look of it. Not surprisingly (given the origin of the above quote) Go 
does, however, and so possibly puts you at the risk of raptor attack... ;)

On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 2:40 PM, sirjofri wrote:
> All that said, this is all syntactic sugar, as C could also be described as 
> syntactic sugar on top of assembly. In the end, you can deal with the memory 
> as you like. C just gives you a bit more type safety.

That's very much how I look at it. It's my favourite macro assembler with type 
checking. :)

On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 2:40 PM, sirjofri wrote:
> I never understood why people have so much trouble understanding pointers, so 
> maybe I'm the weird guy.

I feel a good grasp of assembly language/machine code is important for 
programmers. Without that I'd never really feel I had my feet on the ground. I 
think pointers and addresses are much harder to understand in the abstract.


One of these days I'd like to write a 9P server in LOLcode 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE). It's on my bucket list :)
Something like:
IM IN YR NAMESPACE
I HAS A msg ITZ A Fcall
I IZ convM2S YR msg AN YR buffer MKAY
BOTH SAEM msg'Z type AN Twalk, O RLY?
YA RLY,
...
OIC
KTHXBYE

But it would have to run on Plan 9, FTW, and someone would have to port the 
interpreter...

On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 4:58 PM, ron minnich wrote:
> The acid test for portability, for me, is simple: if it can run on Plan 9 and 
> Unix and WIndows and OSX and bare metal, it's portable. Anything else is not.

I gather LOLcode runs on Unix, Windows and OSX, and has been stable for longer 
than Zig has existed. Or Go for that matter...
IM IN YR BIOS
...
Please no!
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