Conceptual C

Contents

1. Goals
2. Non-Goals
3. Grammar
4. Reference

Goals

• Small (same scale as C) and basically C like
• Match actual machine model, better (more modern) than C
• “Higher level” features such as inheritance and RTTI come from libraries. As with C++ you shouldn’t pay for what you don’t use but we should do better than C++.
• Exceptions may be the exception to the above rule.
• Memory model which supports threading and thread primitives.
• Thread primitives support the following models:
  • Pipes (thread safe Queue messaging system)
  • parallel algorithms (parallel reduce, for_each, etc. - see Intel Thread Building Blocks)
  • simple atomic increment/decrement for shared structures (ref counting for immutable objects and copy-on-write)
• Full compile time introspection (runtime introspection as a library).
• Support the C linkage model
• “Semantic Spaces”
• Library versioning (part of semantic spaces?)
• Value semantics
• Some level of concept support
• Indexed types (Not quite sure how to build this)
• Functions (with state) are first class
• Simple EBNF based grammar

Non-Goals

Grammar

Reference