The Snake

As of recently, I’ve been spending most of my personal coding time in Python. I enjoy a lot of languages and Python certainly isn’t for everything, but when you can use Python, boy is it a joy. As someone who strictly indents in any language, I love the indentation style of denoting blocks. Curly braces have their use, but the vast majority of the time, they’re purely redundant. The same goes for semicolons. I completely agree with the movement of programming languages towards spoken language. The main downfall of Python, comes from how high-level of a language it is.

Being a high-level language allows for it to be as convenient to write in as it is, however you are completely unable to use low level features. It also means Python’s performance is often much lower than that of C++ or other languages. Of course, everyone says that each language has its own use and Python isn’t meant for performance-intensive programs. But why not? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a single modular language that had Python-like simple syntax with the features of JS, Python, C++, etc.

The Sea

Before I take on the task of creating such a language, I want to start smaller. Introducing Sea- It’s C, just written differently. I am currently working on a language called Sea which is effectively C, but with Python-like syntax. I say Python-like because much of the syntax of Python relies on internal data types. My goal is to keep Sea true to C. That is, no increase performance penalty; all of the penalty should be paid at compile time. That’s phase one. Start off with a more concise face for C. Then, I want to create libraries for Sea that take it one step further – introducing data types and functions innate to Python like range, enumerate, tuples, etc. Lastly, I want to use the knowledge I’ve gained to create the language to end all languages as described above.

I’m starting off with a Sea-to-C Transpiler, which is available on Github. In its present state, I am able to transpile a few block declarations and statements. I’m currently working on a data structure for representing and parsing statements. Once that’s made, I can add them one by one. The final result should look something like this:

include <stdio.h>
include "my_header.hea"

define ten as 10
define twelve as 12

void func():
    pass

int main():
    if ten is defined and twelve is defined as 12:
        undefine twelve
        // Why not

    c block:
        // Idk how to do this in Sea so I'll just use C
        printf("Interesting");

    do:
        char *language = "Python"

        print(f"This is an f-string like in {language}")

        for letter in language:
            pass

        break if size(language) == 1
    while true and ten == 11

    return 0

Once the transpiler is done, I want to create an actual compiler. I’ll also want to make a C-to-Sea transpiler eventually as well. I’ll also want to create syntax highlighting for VS Code, a linter, etc. It has come a surprisingly long way in such a short while, and I’ve learned so much Python because of it. I’m also learning a good amount about C. I’m hoping once I create this, there will never be any reason to use C over Sea. There are reasons why certain languages aren’t used in certain scenarios. However, I see no reason why certain syntaxes are limited in the same way. Making indentation a part of the language forces developers to write more readable code while removing characters to type. Languages should be made more simple, without compromising on functionality. That is my goal.

From the blog CS@Worcester – The Introspective Thinker by David MacDonald and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.