←back to thread

Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

(docs.carbon-lang.dev)
155 points samuell | 1 comments | 31 Jul 25 14:23 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
self_awareness ◴[31 Jul 25 18:22 UTC] No.44748522[source]▶
It's strange that they sometimes use [] to specify a type, other times they use (). That doesn't look very consistent to me.

I like the use of [] though, it reminds me of Scala, which I liked before they did the scala 3 fork.

replies(3): >>44748835 #>>44749351 #>>44750860 #
1. Jtsummers ◴[31 Jul 25 22:26 UTC] No.44750860[source]▶
[] here can be read as similar to <> in Rust, C#, Java, or C++ templates (but move the content after the `template` into the function declaration). It's not weird if you're familiar with generic programming (and C++ programmers, the target audience of Carbon right now, will all be familiar with it, they use it with their STL algorithms and collections if nothing else). The () is the ordinary "here is the parameter list" used in pretty much every C-syntax language. C doesn't have generics, so there are several ways people have extended that base C-ish syntax to support generics: <>, [], template<>, and a few others have all been done in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_programming - Worth studying up on if you're unfamiliar with it.