I guess I haven't written in a while. I had more to say on the last topic, but I will have to come back to it. At the moment, my head is full of ideas inspired partly by a new D Programming Language feature ( http://www.digitalmars.com/d/lazy-evaluation...

I believe there is some need for method invocations/function calls (depending on what paradigm you are working within) to be programmatically accessible as objects, even in an unmanaged language. One important reason is debugging support. Consider...

Fortran has an interesting (and somewhat unusual) construct known as "arithmetic if". It looks something like this: IF (arithmetic expression) label1, label2, label3 If the arithmetic expression evaluates to less than zero, control jumps to label1...

I was thinking the other day about certain computationally intensive numerical problems, particularly matrix multiplication, finding the eigenvalues of a matrix, and the Fast Fourier Transform, and how choosing the right algorithm depends on such intricasies...

I want to step back and look at some more specific features. One feature that can be highly controversial in language design (and the evolution of existing languages) is operator overloading. Some languages have no operator overloading and a fairly limited...

I think it is probably a good time to give a couple of motivating examples for my idea of a rich intermediate language. Both examples ultimately have to do with optimization, and are therefore more matters of performance than correctness. However, I believe...

I'm going to start with a top-down view of what this language should be. A good place to start would be the distinction between managed and unmanaged platforms and languages. Most research on the matter has shown that managed code does a lot to reduce...

This is a tricky question. There are probably plenty of features in special purpose languages that don't belong in a general purpose language. However, there are two reasons that we should consider these features: Some special purpose languages...

Briefly, I don't know that I can. But even if what comes out of this isn't a language that will be widely adopted, I still think this is a worthwhile exercise, because: Features I try out that turn out to be good may find their way into other existing...

This is one of those standard questions that everyone who has worked on designing a language has come up against. Instead of getting into specifics, since I can't say for certain at this point what will be better about this new language, let me make the...

I have been interested in language design for a few years now. I guess my fascination started in college when I was exposed to a large number of diverse langauges as part of my coursework. This only grew as I explored the many languages out there that...