[HN Gopher] The C Interpreter: A Tutorial for Cin (1988)
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       The C Interpreter: A Tutorial for Cin (1988)
        
       Author : mananaysiempre
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2023-05-28 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tuhs.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tuhs.org)
        
       | jmclnx wrote:
       | c interpreter, I remember trying to get a good one of those was
       | the holy grail back in the 80s. Then (IIRC), PERL came out and
       | the interpreter talk disappeared.
        
         | zabzonk wrote:
         | i used c, and latterly c++, throught the 1980s - i don't
         | remember any particular interest in interpreters for either.
        
         | qsort wrote:
         | There's some interest in interpreted C++ in the scientific
         | community (e.g. ROOT), but C and C++ are just about the worst
         | possible languages to run interpreted. Ugly as it may be, the
         | "interpreted shell, compiled core" approach is the winning one.
        
           | mananaysiempre wrote:
           | C and C++ are about the worst possible languages to _use for
           | scripting_ --let alone interactive interfaces, which even the
           | current crop of conventionally "scripting" languages is kind
           | of bad at[1].
           | 
           | Having an interpreter to poke at in-development code, though,
           | would IMO still be useful. (I wouldn't use Haskell or
           | SML/OCaml for scripting either, and yet I swear by their
           | interpreters.) Even GDB has something like one--the
           | expression fragment the "print" command understands includes
           | _casts_ , which means it can parse type names, and for
           | unoptimized C that's honestly half the battle.
           | 
           | Or take it from (younger) Russ Cox[2]:
           | 
           | > All current C environments suffer from a much larger
           | problem, namely a lack of interactivity. You can't sit at a
           | prompt, enter C fragments, and see what happens.
           | 
           | [1] http://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-
           | tcl.html
           | 
           | [2] https://swtch.com/~rsc/systems-2002.pdf
        
             | saboot wrote:
             | Depends on the workflow, "C++ for scripting" helped to
             | discover the higgs boson
        
             | Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
             | Python has an excellent interactive shell but I'm not sure
             | this is such a blessing. It seems that nearly every package
             | out there required you to use that shell to understand
             | something mundane, like the type of a function result or
             | properties of some object. I'd rather have good
             | documentation instead.
        
         | mananaysiempre wrote:
         | Other C interpreter threads here[1,2] refer to a number of
         | historical implementations (which you can often find on
         | abandonware sites if that's your thing), but this particular
         | one from 10th Edition Unix seems to mostly go unmentioned on
         | the 'net (this roff source for the paper and a spartan man
         | page[3] are all I could find).
         | 
         | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11748147
         | 
         | [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20950865
         | 
         | [3] https://man.cat-v.org/unix_10th/1/cin
        
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