Crack Becomes Compelling For General Purpose Coding

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Crack Becomes Compelling For General Purpose Coding

Version 0.7 of Crack, a general purpose scripting language aimed for high performance, has been released and it brings a number of new features and improvements. To its developers the Crack language is reaching a pay-off point as being an alternative to writing programs in Python, C++, or Java...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE4MDI

[bug77]

...being an alternative to writing programs in Python, C++, or Java...

Umm, yes. Sure. Whatever you say.

[89c51]

When i read the title i thought it was an article about beneficial effect crack cocaine can have when writing code.

[sturmflut]

> Crack has been developed on Linux x86 and x86-64. It is highly questionable whether it will build under any other platform. Portability will play a bigger role in future versions of the language.

Portability should be a major feature for any runtime environment, moving it to "later" doesn' sound like a good idea. I also do not really understand why they introduce the ":=" assignment operator as in Pascal but then do not enforce it, allowing "=" for assignments. That way you still need "==" for comparisons, which makes the whole ":=" operator obsolete again. I have always hated having to search for misstakes like

if(a = 0)

in beginner's code which are perfectly legal because of the side-effects of the "=" operator.

[F i L]

Hmmm... Crack looks interesting. I'll have to give it a try.

> Crack has been developed on Linux x86 and x86-64. It is highly questionable whether it will build under any other platform. Portability will play a bigger role in future versions of the language.

Portability should be a major feature for any runtime environment, moving it to "later" doesn' sound like a good idea. I also do not really understand why they introduce the ":=" assignment operator as in Pascal but then do not enforce it, allowing "=" for assignments. That way you still need "==" for comparisons, which makes the whole ":=" operator obsolete again. I have always hated having to search for misstakes like

if(a = 0)

in beginner's code which are perfectly legal because of the side-effects of the "=" operator.

I'm sure, being a LLVM language, that portability won't be difficult to accomplish. What the developer probably means is that he only has time to focus on Linux ATM.
But I agree that assignments like "if (a = 0)" shouldn't be allowed in ANY language.

[gururise]

Always interesting to see new languages supporting JIT compilation. Anyone know how it compares performance wise to JIT on Python (ie. PyPy)?

[mrugiero]

> Crack has been developed on Linux x86 and x86-64. It is highly questionable whether it will build under any other platform. Portability will play a bigger role in future versions of the language.

Portability should be a major feature for any runtime environment, moving it to "later" doesn' sound like a good idea. I also do not really understand why they introduce the ":=" assignment operator as in Pascal but then do not enforce it, allowing "=" for assignments. That way you still need "==" for comparisons, which makes the whole ":=" operator obsolete again. I have always hated having to search for misstakes like

if(a = 0)

in beginner's code which are perfectly legal because of the side-effects of the "=" operator.

I can hardly see the use of a scripting language (other than bash and similar, which use is for being de facto standards on their platforms) which is not portable. Just make two builds if your language of choice will support only two outputs and provide compiled binaries.

[gamerk2]

I also do not really understand why they introduce the ":=" assignment operator as in Pascal but then do not enforce it, allowing "=" for assignments. That way you still need "==" for comparisons, which makes the whole ":=" operator obsolete again. I have always hated having to search for misstakes like

if(a = 0)

in beginner's code which are perfectly legal because of the side-effects of the "=" operator.

Because C is the descendant of Fortran/Algol68, not Pascal. While Algol68 used the := operator for assignment and = for equality, C followed the more familiar Fortran syntax, which used = for assignment and == for equality.

[pipe13]

Because C is the descendant of Fortran/Algol68, not Pascal. While Algol68 used the := operator for assignment and = for equality, C followed the more familiar Fortran syntax, which used = for assignment and == for equality.

??? Algol68 yes. But Fortran???? C .NEQ. FORTRAN!

Just nodding in. Crack's a yawner. Wake me when it gets a debugger.