Cdecl – C gibberish ↔ English | Hacker News Reader

Cdecl – C gibberish ↔ English

cdecl.org

69 pointspizza26 comments

Going beyond declarations with this idea: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Baccash/

Thanks for that link!

Too bad SML implementations make it such wizardry to create standalone executables...

Have you looked into MLton? Its a full program optimizing compiler for SML and it generates standalone executable without a problem.

That English does not make it easier to understand.

I think a visual representation of a concrete instance of the type would probably be a better explanation of c type declarations. At the moment this tool seems more a C gibberish to english gibberish translator.

That's why in practice, you should avoid declarations like that. Break down the components into separate `typedef`s with descriptive names that are easy enough to understand in isolation. Then combine those stepwise following the same rule.

Amen

Agreed. They turned this declaration:

   char (*(*x())[5])()

into this English description:

> declare x as function returning pointer to array 5 of pointer to function returning char

What was really needed was just to disentangle the function declarations, like this:

   x: fn () -> &((&fn () -> char)[5])

My immediate reaction isn't "this is so cool and useful for me" but "this might be really useful over traditional speech translation for programmers who can't use their hands". If you know the code but have difficulty inputting it, this might have real value even if it has none for making understanding the code easier.

Funny. The K&R book implements this program if I recall correctly.

It should be possible to make a COBOL-ized C with this - a language with the semantics of C (and broadly analogous syntax, mutatis mutandis) and the wordiness of COBOL.

I wonder if it's already been done?

I imagine you can probably do that with C preprocessor.

Like this?

    #include "evil.h"

    Main then
      displayln("Hello, World!");
    end

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~shakna/cnoevil3/

Many years ago a friend of mine had a hobby project to try to implement BASIC using the C preprocessor. The idea, which seemed rather cockamamie at the time, was to come up with something you could feed a BASIC program to and have it come out as a compiled executable. Nowadays, that kind of idea is everywhere, of course.

I don't know if he ever got it finished (or indeed, if it's even possible in a practical sense. The C preprocessor is Turing-complete (edit: more or less, if you're allowed unlimited runs), so it's obviously theoretically possible).

For anyone else wondering: "cast into block" (^) is a non-standard lambda/closure declaration in C.

Also, Ritchie could have saved a lot of people a lot of hurt by using a "func" keyword.

Two keys to readable C declarations:

1. Just read the clumps in a given decl backwards.

2. Keep the decls of individual concepts in code small enough to grok without breaking your brain. While decls can be mechanically complex, ability to reason about and maintain code is a paramount factor. For C, typedef, struct, nomenclature are friends.

You know, returning an array of triplets of function pointers each of which accept more gloop can be made to be understandable with judicious application of the above. I'm given to understand that this overall approach is all the rage in the Go community ...

I never tried using Unicode characters while posting on HN.

Was under the impression they don’t work here.

Will try next time

Likely explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25024747

Unicode works(¨̮ ) but emojis are ignored

Completely offtopic, but TIL Arc allows U+2194 in titles!

Should work with all Unicode that the font your browser uses has glyphs for. You see UTF-8 decoded and rendered, I don't think Arc does anything special with it. When you look at the page source you can see that the “↔” isn't given as an escape sequence or an HTML entity.

Hacker News strips certain characters out. That specific one is not one of the ones that is removed.

I stand corrected. What's the point of doing that?

This seems like it might be useful to disabled coders.

Genius.

This should be built into IDEs.

TBH, if you need such a helper the code is way too complicated and entangling such messy types first would be preferable and makes the code more readable for everyone.

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