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Comment by ToJans | Hacker News Reader

In the early 90's, C-- was the bee's knees in our local demo scene. We were dabbling around with turbo Pascal a lot, until this gem appeared. I have fond memories of building mod players and mode 13 fx in a jiffy.

The combination of high/low level development was super productive for the intro-/demoscene.

Unfortunately, like most of these interesting blend experiments, it disappeared into the infinitely deep pits of legacy after a few years...

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In fact, there were at least two completely different programming languages called C--. This one seems yet another one

This one (the OP) is used by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, apparently they still use it? I remember reading it was only used in the early days but I might be confusing it with cfront.

Yes, GHC still uses Cmm as its backend: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/commentary/rts/cm...

> A .cmm file is rather like C--. The syntax is almost C-- (a few constructs are missing), and it is augmented with some macros that are expanded by GHC's code generator (eg. INFO_TABLE()).

> (...)

> We say that Cmm is GHC's implementation of C--. This naming scheme is not done consistently everywhere, unfortunately. If you are interested in C-- (which have diverged from Cmm), you can check out its specification.

I remember having copied an interpreter for a c like language called “C - -“ (without the spaces), from a shareware cd-rom. It didn’t have pointers (minus pointers), and also was missing something else (the other minus). Was it that language?

Yes, it's was different C--: http://c--sphinx.narod.ru/ Also sources and backup copy of site: https://github.com/jossk/c--sphinx

I started[1] to update it (required for some KolibriOS[2] programs) to support *nix systems and modern runtimes. Pull requests are welcome.

[1] https://github.com/KolibriOS/cminusminus

[2] http://kolibrios.org/

Sort of off topic but I am guessing you put space between those two minus signs because iOS turns two consecutive minus signs into “—”; the “em dash”.

To get around that problem, first type either as you did minus space minus, or another character between. Then long press the space bar on your onscreen keyboard so it becomes the movable cursor, move back one step and erase the character you put between.

I like to use “.” as the temporary character in between because it keeps you on the symbols keyboard and is close to the dash.

Allow me to demonstrate: C--

https://youtube.com/shorts/xNxFKLjTGeI

You could also go to Settings, Keyboards, and uncheck Smart Punctuation.

True. Personally I generally like the smart punctuation though, and will rather work around the few cases where it does something I don’t want.

When will our tools stop imposing "their" will upon us? I still miss simple T9 correction whenever i want to type a word on Android: it was harder to get it right, but once it was the word didn't change under your feet the second you pressed space to write another word.

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