Cloak VS Cello

Where cloak.h is https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/blob/master/cloak.h

The above macros are admitttedly very hairy. If C had a better preprocessor, but was otherwise unchanged, they could look a lot nicer.

> I never said such a thing. Would appreciate if you didn't put words in my mouth.

A normal part of dialogue is, "I'm going to repeat your point back to you in my own words, and you can either agree with my restating of it, or point out at which point I've misunderstood you". That's what I was doing. "Would appreciate if you didn't put words in my mouth" is unnecessary hostility.

> In my concrete example, given that FILE and DIR were classified as objects, to which of the so-called objects does F(const char*, FILE, DIR) belong?

Take any language which you agree is "OO". Add one new feature (if it isn't already there): functions/methods which don't belong to any class/object. Now the function you are talking about is possible in that language. Did the language thereby suddenly cease to be OO when we added that feature? Most people would disagree with "Yes". But if "No", what is the actual difference between C and that language?

> I use this pattern so much I actually wrote a little metaprogramming language that is capable of generating a lot of the boilerplate for you. Link in my bio, if anyone's interested in looking at it.

Your language [0] is an interesting idea. I've done a lot of similar stuff (not at work, I'm very rarely asked to write C code professionally, but I like mucking around with it in my personal time). My own approach to C metaprogramming involves obtuse preprocessor hacks (e.g [1]) and shell scripts that use grep/awk/sed to find macro invocations and spit out new header files as a result. Maybe your way is better.

A word of warning though – do you realise your name for your language is an anti-gay slur in several dialects of English? You might end up unintentionally upsetting some people with it.

[0] https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

[1] https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,...

Well, mostly I use idioms from the Cloak Wiki (https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,...). It takes some time to realise them :)

Yes, that's C. C macros can take you quite far. Unfortunately because it's just a bunch of macros, it's quite brittle. Like high level abstractions created with macros in assembly language. You have to do all the checking and reasoning about it since the compiler cannot.

[1] https://libcello.org/

It took me a long time to understand, coming from higher level programming, that a lot of exactly that "higher level" is just systematic fat pointer conventions. And because pointers-with-metadata is not a first-class language construct, we invent all these languages that codify a particular fat pointer convention. Cello is an example of what kinds of abstractions can be built on top of a tiny little bit of (non-native) fat pointer convention.

There is a lightweight object oriented extension to C called Objective-C [1] that unfortunately never gained much traction outside the NeXT/Apple ecosystem. There is also Cello [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

[2] https://github.com/orangeduck/Cello

Regular expressions library to validate information before dumping to rocksdb.

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Regular-E...

Non-critical implimentation fun, use cello [1] for 'gawk' functionality in C with C++ objects/classes.

[1] https://libcello.org/

You can achieve a fairly decent runtime safety for some types of project. Check out libcello and my own monster (libstent, lame presentation).

towards lisp related data structures / algorithms (aka recursive tree data structures & algorithms).

So, no distinction between metadata vs. structual storage unless noted.

Anything beyond that tends towards masters & upper level undergraduate level material. aka review the implimentation of a programming language for algorithm & data structure usage per language features.

aka Autonoma / regular expressions backround: Lisp in Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec; ; https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-compilers; On Lisp by Paul Graham; Let over Lambda by Doug Hoyte; C 'macro's pushed to maximum effect : https://libcello.org/

    Left out Comparison of languages; Transform from lang a to lang b; and language implimentation as discussions tend to assume masters / upper level undergraduate knowledge

with skills like this, mind to push cello forward? https://github.com/orangeduck/Cello really like it but not skillful enough to do it myself.