C--
| Paradigm | imperative |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Simon Peyton Jones and Norman Ramsey |
| First appeared | 1997 |
| Typing discipline | static, weak |
| Website | http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html |
| Influenced by | |
| C | |
C-- (pronounced "see minus minus") is a C-like programming language. Its creators, functional programming researchers Simon Peyton Jones and Norman Ramsey, designed it to be generated mainly by compilers for very high-level languages rather than written by human programmers. Unlike many other intermediate languages, its representation is plain ASCII text, not bytecode or another binary format.
C-- is a "portable assembly language", designed to ease the task of implementing a compiler which produces high quality machine code. This is done by having the compiler generate C-- code, delegating the harder work of low-level code generation and optimisation to a C-- compiler.
Work on C-- began in the late 1990s. Since writing a custom code generator is a challenge in itself, and the compiler back ends available to researchers at that time were complex and poorly documented, several projects had written compilers which generated C code (for instance, the original Modula-3 compiler). However, C is a poor choice for functional languages: it does not support tail call optimization, accurate garbage collection or efficient exception handling. C-- is a simpler, tightly-defined alternative to C which does support all of these things. Its most innovative feature is a run-time interface which allows writing of portable garbage collectors, exception handling systems and other run-time features which work with any C-- compiler.
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