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card_zero

Is there a language that's substantially free of gibberish?

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Racket Beginning Student [1] language.

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/htdp-langs/beginner.html

And its predecessor, Scheme, which is my vote.

Those of Algol/Wirth linage, or influenced by then.

Then again people complain that they are too verbose, and they rather write in hieroglyph friendly languages.

Compare

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

and

   var x: pointer to func() pointer to array[5] of pointer to func() char;

or if you wish to replace some keywords with glyphs:

   var x: ^func() ^[5] ^func() char;

And it's always a nice puzzle for the reader to explain why there are three "pointer" in cdecl output and three carets in the ALGOL-like declaration, but only two asterisks in the C declaration.

In this case, the C declaration doesn't match the other two. The variable x is a function that returns a pointer to an array of 5 pointers to functions returning char. Indeed, that's what cdecl.org says:

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

Using the notation you did, that would be:

  var x: func() ^[5] ^func() char

There are only two arrows there now.

If you wanted a pointer to a function like this, you would need a third asterisk in the declaration:

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

Oh, good catch, thank you! But I remember an example with some other tricky C expression/type declarator where the number of actual dereferences differed from the amount of asterisks in the code.

> Using the notation you did, that would be:

Well, it'd be

    func x() ^[5] ^func() char; ...

because it's a function declaration, after all, not a variable.

> But I remember an example with some other tricky C expression/type declarator where the number of actual dereferences differed from the amount of asterisks in the code.

Was it this code?

  void f(int *a) {
      void *p = &a;
      ***(int*(*)[])p = 1;
  }

Reading your comment made me think of this. I tried to find the original post for this, but it seems it was deleted. I only found it again through this post: https://zig.news/sobeston/using-zig-and-translate-c-to-under...

for declaring function pointer?

Any language with type after name :

    // c
    char (*(*x[3])())[5];
    // golang
    var x [3]func() *[5]byte

Depends on the features you want.

forth will contain as much gibberish as you put into it

Yeah sure, COBOL is great in that regard. Basically reads as English.

nope

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