Goals The Falcon Programming Language Part of the documentation for the Falcon language by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science

Index

• Goals

Goals

The Falcon programming language was designed in late 2012 as a target language for a compiler construction course. Therefore, one of its primary goals is compactness. Among its other goals:

• Falcon, following in the footsteps of the Turing programming language, attempts to eliminate the need for extraneous punctuation and syntactic junk. As in Turing, therefore, semicolons are not required, and the main program need not be delimited by any foolish syntax.

  putstr("Hello World!\LF\" output)
  

• In Falcon, the type of bracket, brace or parenthesis used does not imply any semantic categories. Opening and closing delimiters must match, but all grouping delimiters may be used, as in standard mathematical notation. Thus, [(a+b)/(c+d)] is a legal expression and if a is a function of one paramter, a[i] is a legal function call.

• In Falcon, a number of errors in the design of the C programming language are avoided: Arrays are a type distinct from pointers, and array subscripting is not equivalent to pointer arithmetic, following the lead of Pascal. Leading zeros on numeric constants do not indicate a change of number base; instead, the number sign # is used, following the lead of Ada. Breaking out of the middle of a loop is done by raising an exception, and cases of a case-select construct cannot flow into each other, eliminating the use of a specialized break statement.

• The distinction between assignment, comparison and pointer comparison is inherently messy.