The Hascal Programming Language

The name made me expect a mixture of Haskell and Pascal, but it’s more of a new syntax for C++ with a built-in library of useful functionality such as HTTP: it compiles to C++, and the syntax uses C-style blocks with braces so the code looks more like C++, then on closer inspection it does have some elements from Pascal as stated in the website.

It’s the first time I see it, and I’m going to try it out during these days.

One thing I would have done differently would be to implement it in C++ instead of Python: since it requires a C++ compiler anyway, having the translator in C++ would avoid introducing more dependencies. This needs python3 (no big deal) and PyInstaller which at least was available as a package in my Linux distribution.

I’m disappointed to see it uses a single `=` for assignment instead of `:=`, but I understand the utility of keeping such a fundamental aspect close to C++. Otherwise the syntax looks neat, will have to play with it a bit to see how it works out in practice.

The first thing I’ve done is to fix the space indentation in the Makefile (https://github.com/hascal/hascal/pull/14), but now pyinstaller fails with `pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'pyinstaller-hooks-contrib>=2020.6' distribution was not found and is required by pyinstaller`.

Ah, well... I’ll try a bit more to get that to run.

Haskell and Hascal. Don’t have conferences in the same hotel.