Re: [9fans] A new language for Plan 9

[Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com>]

On Fri, 02 May 2008 08:49:24 BST John Stalker <stalker@maths.tcd.ie>  wrote:
> > To ensure programmers will use good style, Bentley will lack goto. To
> > break out of nested loops, you can use the breakout statement.
>
> This worries me.  When I need to implement a finite state autonomon I
> usually use goto.  For that purpose it is by far the clearest and least
> error prone method C offers.  How do I do this in Bentley?  Infinite
> loop, state variable and breakout?  I would argue that that's less
> clear and unless your compiler is very clever it will generate worse
> assembly in this (common) case.

If he provides proper tail-recursion or even a switch
statment you can implement FSAs quite easily.

Clearly he has a lot of enthusiasm but I don't understand why
he is squandering it on implementing boring old language
ideas.  Why not a language for mashing tree structured data
or graphs or for parallel programming or modelling physics of
real objects or something.  He'd learn even if he fails.

Hoare's 1973 paper "Hints on Programming Language Design"
might be relevant to what he is attempting (look for
STAN-CS-73-403)