Communications of the ACM
Cello Could Be Music to the Ears of C Developers
An anticipated C development tool called Cello will incorporate interfaces for structured design, exceptions for controlling error handling, and constructors/destructors to aid in memory management.
Credit: Mid Life Cello
A University of Edinburgh student plans to release a development tool in a couple of months that will facilitate higher-level programming in the C language. Daniel Holden has developed Cello as a GNU99 C library.
Cello features capabilities such as interfaces for structured design, exceptions for controlling error handling, and constructors/destructors to aid in memory management. A duck-typing capability supports generic functions and enhances programming, and syntactic sugar boosts readability.
Holden says the technology will be available under a BSD-3 license, and is geared toward C power users. He notes Cello's high-level structure was "inspired" by Haskell, while the syntax and semantics were inspired by Objective-C and Python.
"It's a bit of an experiment, really," says Holden, who notes that only a few bugs in Cello still need to be worked out. "C's often used in embedded systems and systems very close to the metal and the processor, but it's actually a very simple and elegant language and surprisingly powerful," he says.
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