Missed opportunities

Posted Jun 8, 2013 21:18 UTC (Sat) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Missed opportunities by ncm
Parent article: Little things that matter in language design

Pascal's postfix "^" was extremely practical, perhaps the only real virtue in the language

I would say another feature that should be borrowed from Pascal and its relatives is the declaration grammar that allows unambiguous parsing using simple techniques and without requiring feedback from the symbol table. The way C treats typedef names and C++ classes complicates the compiler, and also makes diagnostics worse: C and C++ compilers really cannot tell bare syntax errors apart from missing or mis-spelled declarations.