Andreas Rumpf <rump...@web.de> writes: > I invented a new programming language called "Nimrod" that combines > Python's readability with C's performance. Please check it out: > http://force7.de/nimrod/ Any feedback is appreciated.
Looks nice in many ways. You also know about PyPy and Felix (felix.sf.net)? It seems a little bit hackish that the character type is a byte. Python did something like that but it ended up causing a lot of hassles when dealing with real Unicode. I think you have to bite the bullet and have separate byte and char types, where char=unicode. It scares me a little about how there are references that can have naked pointers, escape the gc, etc. It would be good if the type system were powerful enough to guarantee the absence of these effects in some piece of data, unless the data is somehow marked with an "unsafe" type. I'd like to see ML-like algebraic types with pattern matching, not just tuple unpacking. The generic system should be able to analyze the AST of type parameters, e.g. iterator<T> would be able to automatically generate an iterator over a list, a tree, or some other type of structure, by actually figuring out at compile time how T is constructed. It's sort of surprising that the compiler is written in a Pascal subset. Why not implement in Nimrod directly, and bootstrap through C? The language and library are missing arbitrary precision integer arithmetic, using GMP or something like that. It would be good to also be able to have value serialization and deserialization to both human readable (nested lists, etc) and binary (for IPC) formats. It's not obvious from the blurbs whether simple functional programming is supported, e.g. how would you implement a function like "map" or "filter"? What would the types be of those two functions? The roadmap says you might implement threading with transactional memory. How will the transactional memory interact with mutable data? Are you going to use OS threads, lightweight threads, or both? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
