

The S-Lang Language - brudgers
http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/docs.html

======
foxhill
this link is incredibly frustrating. what is s-lang? what does it look like?
is it a scripting language? declarative? imperative? some odd hybrid? what is
it's expected use case? show me something! not some page that (links to other
pages that) lethargically drudge through the rational of its design.

this page does not immediately describe what this language actually is; it is
a duck-typed C-like language, with fortran-ish style n-dimensional arrays,
optional type specifiers, and some (seemingly unnecessary) subtle changes from
C that seem to be placed solely as if to say "i am not C!".

why is this on the front page? the documentation isn't exactly for new-comers
(and i assume that most of us here would be). i haven't even found a "hello,
world" example (although i could guess how it would look now).

there seems to have been a lot of C hate on the front page recently, and
whilst C does have its short-comings (some of which s-lang _does_ attempt to
address - although i am not well informed enough to say if it addresses them
adequately), it's not _that_ bad of a language.

perhaps we are just doomed to not-invented-here syndrome, although i'm getting
fed up of the myriad of bicycle alternatives that are presented, when the
cyclist has an accident.

don't interpret this as a critique on s-lang, only on this presentation of it.

~~~
nfoz
[http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/doc/html/slang-1.html#ss1.1](http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/doc/html/slang-1.html#ss1.1)

~~~
ketralnis
Through several "next" links from that one, this is a much better set of
examples
[http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/doc/html/slang-3.html](http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/doc/html/slang-3.html)

------
frob
I actually did all of the data analysis for my undergraduate thesis using this
language. My fat fingers managed to stick an extra & after a ; and found a
reproducible segfault in the interpreter. Walked down the hallway to John's
(jed's) office to file a bug report after lunch.

------
ctkrohn
Not to be confused with Slang, the in-house language at Goldman:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-
sac...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-sachs-
proprietary-programming-language)

~~~
amk_
Or
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_\(programming_language\)),
the precursor to R

------
carapace
See also ATLAST - Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/)

~~~
brudgers
I had forgotten about John Walker's site since last time I spent hours reading
_The Autodesk File_...a great look at the inside history of a startup.

------
jedisct1
S-lang is a great programming language.

And Jed ([http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/](http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/)) is an
extensible text editor using it, and it's a decent and lightweight alternative
to Emacs. Bindings are the same, automatic indentation works wonderfully well,
and one might prefer S-lang to Emacs Lisp.

Jed remains my text editor of choice today, and the first thing (along with
ag, zsh and cowsay) I install on a new machine.

------
xienze
Wow, this takes me back. I wrote a USENET article downloader that utilized
S-Lang as its scripting language back in 1998.

