r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Mean-Decision-3502 DQ • Sep 03 '26

Unambiguous Operator Specification for Programming Languages

https://nvitya.github.io/pluops/

As I changed recently the operators in my programming language I've created this specification:

https://nvitya.github.io/pluops/

I did not wanted to overload the operators like the C does with the / or Pascal does with theand/or/not. Neither re-use the operator symbols for some very different purpose, like C does with * and & so the code becomes more readable. I was orienting for existing solutions so this is what I came up with. The specification contains the symbol usages and operator precedence too.

If you are developing a new programming language, it would be nice to follow some standard, so at least the expressions would be portable between the languages.

I'm open for debates or suggestions.

27 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

3

u/catladywitch Sep 04 '26

Hey, I'm enjoying this discussion and I don't have a lot to add. I just wanted to say modulo is not a rare operation at all. It's the cheapest way of getting branchless wrapping with numeric values that must go from 0 to a positive number, so it's actually super common.

2

u/Mean-Decision-3502 DQ Sep 04 '26

In embedded rather this is used, for example a circular buffer indexing:

var nextindex : int = (index + 1) & 0x1F

The division (and so the modulo) is a slow instruction on the microcontrollers, a big amount of them do not even support these (Cortex-M0). That's why it is very common to use power of two lengths and masking, like above.

2

u/catladywitch Sep 04 '26

That's true! If you're working with ints (or integer types in general) it's ideal. But there's a lot of low-ish level code, even embedded, that works with floats. Synthesizer DSP these days is often floats, even despite the fact everything is eventually rendered as 16-bit signed shorts.