From: bc@freeuk.com

On 26/11/2025 14:49, David Brown wrote:
> On 26/11/2025 13:05, bart wrote:
>> On 26/11/2025 07:55, David Brown wrote:

>>> NIH syndrome combined with megalomania.  Other people do this stuff
>>> better than you.

>> I made a decision to keep my systems language at a certain level
>> regarding such things as the type system, while having lots of
>> convenient micro-features:
>>
>>      print int@(x+y).[52..62]
>>
>> This type-puns a float64 r-value expression into an int, and extracts
>> that bitfield (which is the unsigned exponent field when float64 uses
>> iee754).
>>
>> I'd be interested to see how you can do this better, using general
>> language features (adding a dedicated .exponent property to floats
>> would be cheating!).
>>
>
> What an absurd thing to ask for.

You said, "Other people do this stuff better than you". Presumably,
devising language features. So I gave an example of a small task, and
asked which features those people would devise, or what solution they
would use.

>  You have a special feature in your
> language for writing obscure things that are rarely if ever useful in
> normal coding.

Yes, I call them 'micro-features'.

The examples showed rvalue type-punning and bitfield extraction, which
were recent examples in this thread.

In C, the solution for my example might look like this:

     double temp = x+y;
     printf("%llu", ((*(uint64_t*)&temp)>>52) & 2047);

Rather more fiddly and error prone, and it needs an auxiliary statement
that makes it awkward to embed into an expression. (I also had to think
twice about that format code.)

BTW here is how my C transpiler translated it, so it /can/ be done
without explicit temporaries:

     mminc$m_print_u64(msysc$m_getdotslice((i64)msysc$m_tp_r64toi64((x +
y)),(i64)52,(i64)62),NULL);


>  Of course you can write the same effect in C, in a
> simple function a few lines long.

Yes, everyone can invent their own solutions. (I've just taken that a
few steps further with an entire language.)

>  And that's the way it should be -
> obscure things should not take up cognitive space that makes common
> things harder.

But _BitInt(12) was also used as an example of saving a few lines of
code or having to write a function or macro (there, to sign-extend the
low-N bits of an integer value, when N is known at compile-time).


>> But as a systems language, it is much more enticing than C.
>
> And that is presumably why it is so much more popular than C.

If it was generally available then I think quite a few would prefer it.
As it is I enjoy the benefits myself.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)