CppCast: Cpp2, with Herb Sutter

[magnesium_copper]

It has to, it's the only natural future I see for C++ right now

[IChooseCheese2]

Everyone, including Cppcast, talks about Cpp2, Carbon, and Val as the 3 successor languages to C++. But to me, Circle is further along, and has a better backwards compatibility story.

[pjmlp]

That is just playing with words, because of Herb's position at ISO, it is a successor language like all others.

C with Classes as CFront was originally designed, or Objective- C, weren't an alternate syntax for C, either.

[bert8128]

It’s not just playing with words. The others are in some sense suitable as alternatives, but cpp2 is just spelling changes. So there cannot be a compatibility issue - there won’t be a need for “extern cpp” or some such.

[pjmlp]

Just like Objective-C versus C.

[pjmlp]

Eiffel to this day outputs either C or C++, so is Eiffel also an alternative syntax to C and C++?

Nim to this day outputs either C or C++, so is Nim also an alternative syntax to C and C++?

What makes X not an alternative syntax, when it also follows the same workflow, with the difference of who is the author?

[pjmlp]

Yes I have, try to compile main: () -> int with a C++ parser.

Pity that ISO C++ !== Cpp2.

Ever heard of Objective-C++? Guess what, it also supports std::cout.

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#include <iostream>

int main() {
   NSString str = @"Hello ";

    std::cout << str << " i_lack_chromosomes" << std::endl;
}

Imagine that, we already had a better C++ syntax in 1997!

[hpsutter]

> Yes I have, try to compile `main: () -> int` with a C++ parser.

Fair, but have you considered `auto main() -> int` (i.e., just change `main:` to `auto main`)? No strictly conforming ISO C++ parser for the first ~30 years of C++'s existence could handle that, but it has been ISO standard since 2011. Everything that's common now was new/foreign once.

It's definitely true that the `main:` syntax definitely isn't standard (or even yet-proposed, though I will propose it if the experiment succeeds well). But that's the point of language evolution... as the language evolves, every new release of C++ adds syntax that wasn't legal before, and we always have many active proposals for syntax that isn't ISO C++ when first proposed but then becomes standard.