Saturating the name-space

We are saturating the name space for programming languages. These days I discovered the Odin Programming Language “”The Data-Oriented Language for Sane Software Development.” According to its FAQs there are some things we may learn for Eiffel.

Its guiding principles are

• Simplicity and readability
• Minimal: there ought to be one way to write something
• Striving for orthogonality
• Programs are about transforming data into other forms of data
  • Code is about expressing algorithms—not the type system
• There is embedded knowledge and wisdom in older programming languages
• The entire language specification should be possible to be memorized by a mere mortal

Its featre are features (in no particular order):

• Full UTF-8 Support
• Custom allocators that are simple to use:
  • Memory arenas/regions, pools, stacks, etc. which can be easily added
• Context system for allocations, logging, and thread data
• Built-in types and procedures that take advantage of the context system:
  • new(type), and make use the context’s allocator (unless explicitly given)
  • Dynamic arrays and hash maps ([dynamic]int and map[string]int)
• Array programming
  • a, b: [4]f32; c := a * b
  • i := a.x * b.y
  • v := swizzle(a, 1, 2, 0)
• Explicit procedure overloading
• Introspection on all types
• High control over memory layout
  • Alignment
  • Field offsets
  • Endianness
  • Data sizes
• Endian specific integer types (useful for specific data formats)
  • u32le
  • u64be
• Decent package system and file handling
• No bad preprocessor
• Type inference
  • x: int = 1
  • x := 1 // x is deduced to be an int
• using
  • making everything a namespace (similar to Pascal’s with but on steroids)
  • Ability to have subtype polymorphism
• Multiple return values
• Clean, consistent, and fast to parse syntax
• No need for procedure prototypes
• defer statements
  • defer a statement until the end of scope (akin to D’s scope(exit))
• Nested procedures and types
• Tagged unions and untagged unions
• Ranged for loops
• Labelled branches
  • break label_name
• break by default in switch statements
  • Explicit fallthrough
• “Raw” strings
  • x := `what "the" string?`
• cstring for legacy use
• Parametric polymorphism (“generics”)
• Foreign system
• Compile time when statements
• Bounds checking which is togglable at the statement level:
  • #no_bounds_check #bounds_check
• i128 and u128 support

And lots more!