Introductions

Since you're here, I presume you're curious about what Tangent is, and if you should spend your very valuable web browsing time to care. The original motivation for the language was the difficulty in making component based designs for game development. That led to a few experiments, which led to wanting to try out some features, which led to Version 1. Version 1 involved quite a bit of fumbling around, bad ideas, and the prototyping you'd expect from a version 1. This journal will focus on the design and development of version 2.


Tangent is designed to be a general purpose programming language. It will end up being 'higher level' than C# and Java. It is statically typed. Beyond that, it is fairly peculiar and hard to categorize. The core concept that many of the features build off of is Order of Operation Inference.

Type Inference is a well known feature of programming languages. You have a set of known operations on known types in a known order and the compiler figures out what the resultant type of those operations is. Order of Operation Inference turns that on its head. Tangent forces each statement to result in void. It also compiles all of the Type information before compiling the Executable information. Now with a known resultant type, known operations on known types the compiler figures out what order of operations on those operations 'works' (with a few constraints/preferences to cut down on ambiguity/the search pool).

The original motivation for this was originally to allow user defined free functions that could act as infix operators and have arbitrary names. Unfortunately, that meant that order of operations on arbitrary operators is pretty much unusable. You either just read the things from left to right (which sucks when infix operators were the main goal and leads to Lisp-like paren overload usually anyways) or you have the programming specify some priority (which never works, since the priority has to line up correctly with random priorities set by other programmers). Inferring the order of operations provides a mechanism to solve that problem without forcing the programmer to do more than they would normally do. Further, it provides interesting behavior that can be utilized for other features.


Next time, we'll go into some of the type system basics, as well as some of the practical implications of Order of Operation Inference.