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The S-Lang Language

28 points| brudgers | 11 years ago |jedsoft.org | reply

12 comments

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[+] foxhill|11 years ago|reply
this link is incredibly frustrating. what is s-lang? what does it look like? is it a scripting language? declarative? imperative? some odd hybrid? what is it's expected use case? show me something! not some page that (links to other pages that) lethargically drudge through the rational of its design.

this page does not immediately describe what this language actually is; it is a duck-typed C-like language, with fortran-ish style n-dimensional arrays, optional type specifiers, and some (seemingly unnecessary) subtle changes from C that seem to be placed solely as if to say "i am not C!".

why is this on the front page? the documentation isn't exactly for new-comers (and i assume that most of us here would be). i haven't even found a "hello, world" example (although i could guess how it would look now).

there seems to have been a lot of C hate on the front page recently, and whilst C does have its short-comings (some of which s-lang does attempt to address - although i am not well informed enough to say if it addresses them adequately), it's not that bad of a language.

perhaps we are just doomed to not-invented-here syndrome, although i'm getting fed up of the myriad of bicycle alternatives that are presented, when the cyclist has an accident.

don't interpret this as a critique on s-lang, only on this presentation of it.

[+] frob|11 years ago|reply
I actually did all of the data analysis for my undergraduate thesis using this language. My fat fingers managed to stick an extra & after a ; and found a reproducible segfault in the interpreter. Walked down the hallway to John's (jed's) office to file a bug report after lunch.
[+] carapace|11 years ago|reply
See also ATLAST - Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit

https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/

[+] brudgers|11 years ago|reply
I had forgotten about John Walker's site since last time I spent hours reading The Autodesk File...a great look at the inside history of a startup.
[+] jedisct1|11 years ago|reply
S-lang is a great programming language.

And Jed (http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/) is an extensible text editor using it, and it's a decent and lightweight alternative to Emacs. Bindings are the same, automatic indentation works wonderfully well, and one might prefer S-lang to Emacs Lisp.

Jed remains my text editor of choice today, and the first thing (along with ag, zsh and cowsay) I install on a new machine.

[+] xienze|11 years ago|reply
Wow, this takes me back. I wrote a USENET article downloader that utilized S-Lang as its scripting language back in 1998.