The "spiral rule" doesn't get at the heart of declarations. It's just by some guy that tried to figure it out on his own, and what he discovered was basically not declarations but the precedence rules of C expressions ;-)
> It also seems telling that no recent language has followed C’s example for declaration style, which is more implicit than explicit.
Actually most languages don't let the user do what C declarations let you do. For example, in Java (almost) everything is an object, and you can't just create a triple-indirected pointer. So, these languages can afford a declaration syntax that is less potent.
And then there are other more systems-oriented languages that chose to not copy C declarations. They come with their own gotchas. As examples I will pick D and Rust.
In D, you create a multi-dimension array like this: int[5][10] arr; Leading you to believe that you can use it as arr[4][9]; Wrong. That's an out-of-bounds error. You need to write arr[9][4]. Now, was that totally not confusing? The alternative is to expand these types systematically to the left, i.e. write [10][5]int, and maybe move the type to the right of the variable name, as in "let arr [10][5]int;". Honestly I don't like that either.
I've never really used Rust (either), but its downside, in my opinion, is that it has much more distracting syntax / punctuation.
I would love if there was a uniformly better way to declare things than the C way, but I still think C has the best tradeoffs for my practical work. The next time that I toy with language design I might try to simply go with C declarations, prefixed with a sigil or "let" or something, to remove the need for the lexer hack.
> It also seems telling that no recent language has followed C’s example for declaration style, which is more implicit than explicit.
Actually most languages don't let the user do what C declarations let you do. For example, in Java (almost) everything is an object, and you can't just create a triple-indirected pointer. So, these languages can afford a declaration syntax that is less potent.
And then there are other more systems-oriented languages that chose to not copy C declarations. They come with their own gotchas. As examples I will pick D and Rust.
In D, you create a multi-dimension array like this: int[5][10] arr; Leading you to believe that you can use it as arr[4][9]; Wrong. That's an out-of-bounds error. You need to write arr[9][4]. Now, was that totally not confusing? The alternative is to expand these types systematically to the left, i.e. write [10][5]int, and maybe move the type to the right of the variable name, as in "let arr [10][5]int;". Honestly I don't like that either.
I've never really used Rust (either), but its downside, in my opinion, is that it has much more distracting syntax / punctuation.
I would love if there was a uniformly better way to declare things than the C way, but I still think C has the best tradeoffs for my practical work. The next time that I toy with language design I might try to simply go with C declarations, prefixed with a sigil or "let" or something, to remove the need for the lexer hack.