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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

The generally accepted definition of a low level language is a language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture. In actuality, C is a lower level functional programming language than Ante, because C functions are first-class citizens.

I like the lack of GC! What is the method for always incremental compilation? The benefits are obvious, but isn't it problematic to have two authoritative representations of the same source? It would be fantastic if you get that to work well!

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Fwiw C is actually a huge abstraction over modern hardware.

It's a good representation of the PDP-11 and similar-era computers. It's also a good abstraction for modern microcontrollers.

C's view of the world is also a really poor fit for today's larger CPUs. Your computer has to jump through a ton of hoops to make itself seem C-like. C has no concept of vectorization, speculative execution, branch prediction, multiple cores, caches, MMUs, etc.

For basically any desktop/laptop/smartphone CPU, the C runtime is more like a little VM than an accurate model of the hardware underneath.

> C has no concept of vectorization

OK, but vectorisation is exposed by the instruction set, as instructions[1]

> speculative execution, branch prediction, ... caches, MMUs

How would you expose speculative execution & branch prediction? Cache behaviour is well understood so what's wrong with it? What would you do to expose MMUs to the programmer, and what would they do with it/how would it help?

[1] but aren't there libraries that expose it just fine in a portable way?

Speculative execution and branch prediction are adaptations to compensate for C's failings as a description of desired semantics.

But they are thoroughly ingrained into the technology, and will not easily be rooted out.

Your first sentence doesn't answer any question. The second is irrelevant. Please make some concrete suggestions.

There seems little value in "exposing" crap we would be better off not building in the first place.

The more expressive your language is, the less the runtime and hardware needs to guess about.

So what are the $%^&* semantics we're supposed to build into the language to avoid the need for speculation via OOO exec and branch prediction. Because as a guy interested in languages you might have something to teach me, assuming you have any idea what you're talking about.

Language design is hard.

Eh, isn't it a bit of a stretch to claim you can program functionally in C? You can mimic it, but without easy closures you can't follow _any_ functional programming patterns that are built on composing functions into new ones in expressions (e.g. binding the operation argument to a fold)

C is great, and it would be cool to see something that is similarly close to the instruction set but has functions as values

A functional programming language is a programming language in which functions are first class citizens. C is such a language.

Of course there are many programming patterns that are in more acceptable functional programming languages than C. Whether a programming language is considered functional is not the same as which patterns are supported in the language.

Your idea of what FP means is completely nonstandard.

For the record, there is not one accepted definition, but we can get close by saying that FP languages are those based on lambda calculus as their semantics core. And the primary mechanism in lambda calculus is variable capture (as done in closures).

C is based on the Von-Neumann model and has absolutely nothing to do with the lambda calculus. No reasonable PL expert considers it functional.

There is a book about it [0], you can download it here [1]. It uses SML to teach FP. I did the exercises on the train in Termux and Vim.

[0] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Functional-C-Hartel-Mu...

[1] https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/5128727/book.pd...

(edit) add download link and background.

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