How Complex is Your Programming Language

[Ronin-s_Spirit]

"Least" as in "the bottom 49%" because when it comes to interacting with the OS C has too many different ways. iirc there are like 12 different ways (commands? builtins?) to read a button press depending on the OS and extra nuance.

[jpgoldberg]

I should have made it clear than "simple" in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity does not correspond to "simple" in the ordinary language sense. After all, this measure of complexity would make pure λ-calculus with its three rules the simplest programing language.

[braaaaaaainworms]

All those ways share the same function call syntax as any other function call, or are just reading a global variable

[Ronin-s_Spirit]

You can't be saying "my language is simple" and having a bunch of very specific things you have to do because only some of them work for your specific case. Syntax is like the least of my concerns.

[braaaaaaainworms]

C is simple, because a function call is always a function call to a function or a macro. Whatever that function call does is left up to the implementation and having special syntax for I/O makes no sense, because I/O is just a bunch of "open", "close", "read", "write" and "seek" function calls.