A syntax comparison across many languages

http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across-languages.html

by Rickasaurus • 14 years ago

96 30 14 years ago

http://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting is a similiar resource for php, perl, python and ruby only.

oconnor0• 14 years ago

http://hyperpolyglot.org/ provides comparisons between various "families" of languages - not just the above. But there isn't a comparison between, say, Ruby and Haskell.

brittohalloran• 14 years ago

My big takeaway is that Ruby generally does things the "most-popular" way, and that maybe a lot of those obscure languages are obscure for a reason (object["method"](params) to invoke a method?!?)

walrus• 14 years ago

object["method"](params) is just an alternative syntax. Normally you would do object->method(params).

ajanuary• 14 years ago

You mean like JavaScript? Not sure why it's not listed there next to Pike.

    var f = []
    f['push'](2)
    // f -> [2]

Pike also has the more familiar object->method(params) syntax.

It's actually a pretty useful bit of syntax. I've been using it recently when combining multiple objects deserialised from json.

    var report = [name, dob]
    var person = { name: 'Andrew', dob: '1980/03/23' }
    _.each(report, function(prop) {
        console.log(person[prop])
    }

wilmoore• 14 years ago

Good call...and for those not necessarily using something underscore.js-like (thought almost always nice-to-have):

  var report = ['name', 'dob'];
  var person = { name: 'Andrew', dob: '1980/03/23' };

  report.forEach(function(prop){
    console.log(person[prop]);
  });

rll2• 14 years ago

Not sure about that. The regex for variable identifiers shows that Ruby is alone on the island of languages that force a lowercase first character.

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

Go uses casing for semantic meaning as well. Also, you can use non-A-Z in ruby source.

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names#Ruby

CanSpice• 14 years ago

I haven't looked at everything, but the Perl variable identifier regexp is incorrect, as Unicode characters are allowed as of 5.12, which was released in 2010. For that matter, same goes for Java, except Unicode letters are allowed.

rll2• 14 years ago

They are allowed in PHP as well. The set of regexes looks odd for a number of the languages actually.

hythloday• 14 years ago

Java also allows currency symbols (e.g. £€$) as identifiers.

I know this because I had a colleague who was quite proud of having switched to Dvorak, and another colleague who immediately wrote a code-generation tool that emitted € characters in variable names...which are untypeable on a Dvorak keyboard. :)

emmelaich• 14 years ago

Java allows a vast array of odd characters, including nulls.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4838507/why-does-java-all...

nn2• 14 years ago

Dvorak doesn't support the Alt-<type unicode number on number block> trick?

dsr_• 14 years ago

Eleven ways to comment to the end of the line; five of them used only by one language each.

jonathansizz• 14 years ago

And the most common way is one of the worst (most inconvenient), although J seems to win the prize.

kamkha• 14 years ago

"Inconvenient" because typing a # requires a modifier key on most keyboard?

gebe• 14 years ago

Well, depends on your layout. That might be the case on a US keyboard but for many others (for example German, Spanish, the Nordic countries' layout and many other European and non-European layouts) it would be preferred over for example "//". For "//" you need to use a modifier (just as with '#') but you need to stretch more (or use both hands) and as well tap it two times. That's one of the reasons why I prefer to code using an English layout in my IDE/editor :)

emillon• 14 years ago

Wadler's law strikes again :

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadlers_Law

perlgeek• 14 years ago

Also relevant: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page Some parts are about language features, others are about implementations of algorithms in many languages.

mbell2• 14 years ago

What is "Assembler"? Is that supposed to mean assembly? If so what architecture uses '!' as a line comment token?

heretohelp2• 14 years ago

Not an architecture, an assembler.

mbell2• 14 years ago

Fair enough, my underlying point is that `assembly` isn't a language, it's a family of languages which have a set of characteristics which are tied very tightly to the instruction set used (often called an architecture). Comments would be a characteristic of the compiler, which you may call an 'assembler' if you wish, however an assembler is not a language.

pjmlp• 14 years ago

Assembler is what translates assembly code into executables, a compiler for assembly if you so wish.

In many countries like mine, both terms tend to be used interchangeably.

haberman• 14 years ago

Oh poor XSLT. I can't decide whether to laugh or cry.

ret• 14 years ago

#if 0 ... #endif in C/C++ is not a true comment -- commented text is parsed by preprocessor.

splicer• 14 years ago

This glosses over some important syntactic differences. For instance, a semicolon is used differently in C than it is in Pascal. In C, it's a terminator; in Pascal, it's a separator.

jhrobert• 14 years ago

This is quite an amazing achievement.

There are a few other dimension to explore beside syntax. Like "are arrays 0 or 1 based?" etc

Apparently the author is now part of the opalang effort. They used to have a slightly weird syntax for their language and later changed that to have it look more like JavaScript. That's a strange move when concise syntaxes à la Ruby or CoffeeScript seem popular.

astrodust• 14 years ago

If there was ever a project that required an emergency typographer, this would be one. That's a terrible presentation for a lot of great information.

A syntax comparison across many languages

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