SS Scripting System

What I'm Doing Now

Reading two books about Design Patterns.
Reason - see what the requirements are for best-practice OOP (Object-Oriented Programming.)
Designing and implementing a Tokenizer for SS source.
Adjusting the SS language to fit requirements and clarify the design.
Carefully studying C# and Java, vs my SS language. Find issues I need to change.

Why am I creating a new programming language?

OK - I've been retired now for a few years, and I am no longer working in compiler language development - why design a new language? I have been keeping up with ideas in programming languages ever since I began in this field back in the early 1960s. I learned and worked with a succession of languages, each trying to "fix" some issue in programming. Languages have come and gone in popularity because new ideas happened.

The first was Fortran, which I was involved in as a compiler developer, published a paper on local optimization ("Local Optimizations"), managed a compiler development group, and participated in ANSI standardization of Fortran.

Along the way I learned and used, or taught classes about, or at least played with, these languages: Algol 60, PL/I from IBM, Ada (designed for government contracting), Pascal (designed for education), then I learned C.

C was different - it was compact, simple, and very efficient. As a compiler developer, I felt that C was the first language that I thought could be used for system programming. I used C professionally for 20 years.

Along came objects and classes. The language C++ turned the programming world upside down and added new goals and ideas. The ideas of data encapsulation and inheritance were encouraged. Design patterns developed.

From there the language horizons expanded. Along came Sun's Java. Then Microsoft's C# for their .NET system. And recently, GO from Google.

I have examined and found significant ideas in languages Eiffel, Parasail, Scala, Python and Ruby, and one which I have used extensively - PHP.

So these all contributed to my own thinking, thus my many "play" languages along all those years (one in 2003 was "CodeBol") began to solidify, beginning September 16, 2009.

The result is SS - Scripting System.

Goals in the design of SS

Object oriented, with single inheritance and multiple interface implementation.
EVERYTHING looks like an object. Limited reflection is supported.
Arrays, strings, variables all look like objects.
Parameterized interfaces.
Reduced punctuation and less words. Less parentheses. Avoid two-word keywords, such as unsigned int.
Similar capability with Java and C#, yet simpler.
Like C#, support read-only and write-only variables.
No need to support event and threads, initially.
Definition of operators and type casts.
Support Perl compatible regular expressions built-in.
Support for attributes like metric or English units.
Keep fairly simple - teachable in less time than the leading languages.
Reduce programming errors.

Check more at compile time.
Avoid paren and bracket balance problems.
Consistency between strings and arrays.
Functions with many or optional arguments simplified.
Reduce dependency on correct order of arguments on functions.
The 'mode' capability avoids some of this problem.
String output formatting better controlled.
Attributes feature reduces mistakes using units of measurement.
(A NASA Mars orbiter failed because metric and English units were mixed.))
Change inconsistent syntax - the C for statement is strange. It uses semicolons inside parentheses.

Capable of compilation to machine code.

To comment:

E-mail me using: john (at) IdahoBagwells (dot) NET.