ZL: An Extensible System Programming Language

by Kevin Atkinson

No single language can possibly provide every useful construct, since
language designers have to stop somewhere.  Language designers have
realized this and to correct the problem, have proposed adding macro
systems.  Once these systems become powerful enough, however, certain
language primitives become unnecessary.  Indeed a powerful enough
macro system supports a language with a small number of language
primitives, and one that minimizes the assumptions behind the compiler
and run-time system.  A programmer thus gains maximum control over how
things are implemented.

I intend to built a macro-based language for the system programming
domain.  The core language will provide the minimal number of
constructs to implement things efficiently and the rest will be
defined using a sophisticated macro like system.  However, unlike most
macro systems, this system will be deeply integrated into the basic
language and it can be used to control things that most languages give
the user no control over, such as the layout of the data when virtual
inheritance is used. The syntax of the language will be very
similar to C, but the top level grammar will be extremely simple and will
only serve to separate one statement from the next.  Everything else,
including precedence and associativity, will be dealt with using a
sophisticated pattern matching system.