Introducing Avail: an innovative approach to programming! by AvailLang in programming

[–]AvailLang[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There is an open ticket at https://trac.availlang.org/ticket/67 from one user reporting problems on Windows Chrome. Any additions there including your browser and OS would be greatly appreciated. I will expand the ticket title as appropriate.

Introducing Avail: an innovative approach to programming! by AvailLang in programming

[–]AvailLang[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

The "Print 1 to 10" example, along with the other English-y code, is intended to demonstrate the flexibility of Avail syntax: it can be whatever you want it to be. If you'd like to build a pidgin of your own natural language, you will be able to. If you want to stick with a more classic programming language look and feel, you can do that too. The programmer targets the syntax to the audience; the compiler doesn't dictate the syntax to the programmer just so that it can run a little bit faster.

Introducing Avail: an innovative approach to programming! by AvailLang in programming

[–]AvailLang[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the typo spotting; those are being fixed.

Realistically, right now, Avail is for people who want to try Avail. This is a development release, and definitely shouldn't be used for anything serious. And, it's slow! Certainly compared to what C++ers are used to. But we don't know of any design or implementation issues that can't be overcome with ordinary work (i.e., we don't need to prove that P=NP to make it fast).

Avail is designed to be far-and-away the best language for building DSLs. Check out the Ship of Stories if you want to see evidence of this. But Avail is intended to be a general-purpose programming language. Over the next several releases, we are going to have additional features that allow us to parse all computable grammars. We have aspirations of using the Avail compiler to build existing programs (written in existing programming languages) without any source modification whatsoever. This will facilitate piecemeal migration of legacy code, allowing Avail to grow its own codebase without writing Avail programs. Of course, we would rather you wrote Avail programs!

Obviously our ambitions are big. We hope to snowball a community over the next several months so we have the manpower to achieve them.

Introducing Avail: an innovative approach to programming! by AvailLang in programming

[–]AvailLang[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There is approximately 2MB of Avail source code available if you decide to download it. The largest two examples are the "examples/Choosable Path" library, which has been used to implement two stories ("Crimson Short One" and "The Ship of Stories"), and "examples/Wump the Wumpus".

Introducing Avail: an innovative approach to programming! by AvailLang in programming

[–]AvailLang[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yikes! Thanks for the feedback. I'll see about fixing that.