Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations

Re:Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations by tomjakubowski on Monday January 07, 2019 @04:11AM (#18843845)

In the interest of furthering annoying language smuggery, the rough Rust equivalent:

    foo: fn() -> Box<[i32; 3]>

Alternately, if the pointer is into static memory and not something allocated on the heap:

    foo: fn() -> &'static <[i32; 3]>;

That's pretty nice to look at and not too hard to read. In my opinion, for commonly used syntax (like fn decls), some well-chosen punctuation marks (', ->, :, in this case) are often boon to readability compared to keywords. So I think the Rust syntax in this case is nicer than Ada's.

But in any case, while complicated C declarations may be uglier and take more effort to read than those in other languages, they are at least tractable once you learn the trick of "declaration follows use" and working backwards as GP describes.

Separately, though, what do you mean by your "gimmick" comment?

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Re:Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations by exitcode00 on Monday January 07, 2019 @10:03AM (#18845646)

> Separately, though, what do you mean by your "gimmick" comment?

Just meaning the website CDecl - its a neat tool to make C readable in English, but Ada is a real language used to make planes fly etc. Many people have contempt for it though which is why I made the joke xD

Interesting that you can note which type of memory an anonymous type comes from in Rust. I suppose its for optimization purposes? Doesn't seem that helpful from a pure typing perspective.

As an aside I doubt a layman would be able to understand that notation in Rust, whereas my girlfriend might be able to grasp or read Ada code or the output of CDecl.

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Re:Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations by masklinn on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:21AM (#18844602)

> Alternately, if the pointer is into static memory and not something allocated on the heap

There's really no need to box a 12-bytes array in the first place.

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