Home » forums » LtU Forum The Origins of the BitC Programming Language The process of programming language creation is a subject of too little reflection and retrospection. Newcomers to the field (including, in some measure, us) regularly propose new languages without quite understanding what they are getting into or how big the task is.

... This paper describes the motivation and early design evolution of the BitC programming language, making our excuses in hindsight and providing a compilation of some of the things that we learned along the way.

... The ML module system [18] is fully understood only by David MacQueen, and only on alternating weeks. The Scheme module system [8] required the combined brilliance of Matt Flatt and Matthias Felleisen (and six revisions of the language standard) to achieve. From the perspective of a mere operating systems weenie, it's all rather discouraging, but what is the reluctant programming language designer to do?

... The real reason we stuck with the LISP-ish syntax is that we didn't want to be fiddling with the parser while designing the language, and (to a lesser degree) because we didn't want to encourage programmers until we thought the language was ready. The Origins of the BitC Programming Language Warning: Work in Progress Comment viewing options Flat list - collapsed Flat list - expanded Threaded list - collapsed Threaded list - expanded Date - newest first Date - oldest first Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.