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carbon-lang/docs/design/files_libraries_and_packages.md
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Jon Meow d031f3cdab An incomplete, early, and in-progress overview of the language design. (#83)
Co-authored by: chandlerc

- Based on [PR 22](https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/83)
- [Idea topic](https://forums.carbon-lang.dev/t/proposal-for-an-incomplete-rough-high-level-overview-ready-for-early-feedback/52)
- [RFC](https://forums.carbon-lang.dev/t/rfc-an-incomplete-early-and-in-progress-overview-of-the-language-design/73)
- [Decision announcement](https://forums.carbon-lang.dev/t/accepted-an-incomplete-early-and-in-progress-overview-of-the-language-design/110)

This proposal should be considered a starting point of the language design. It's not intended to be final; language details may change. This is intended to offer a reasonable starting point for:

- Example code.
- Conceptualizing Carbon at a high level.
- Reasonable, but not necessarily final, approaches to features in README.md.
  - If any idea is obviously bad, we can clean it up here.

This proposal is not intended to achieve:

- A whole language design.
  - This is way too much work for a single proposal; this is a skeletal framework only.
  - As we work on feature-specific designs, we may decide to use other approaches. That's fine: we only need somewhere to start.
  - The summaries in README.md may be expected to change over time.
- Feature-specific files aren't intended to be well-written or comprehensive. They are a quick jot of prior thoughts.
  - We want to avoid getting stuck on language details that we should consider
    more carefully regardless. If you're passionate about a feature, please feel
    free to start a new proposal for it.
  - Each and every aspect of the suggested overview should be subject to careful
    examination and justification before it becomes a settled plan of record.

Chandler started this with https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/22. I've taken it over with the following changes:

- More of a directory hierarchy.
- Trying to thin out the main file (now README.md) to lighter summaries of features.
- Details/rationale/alternatives should be in feature-specific files.
  - Draft files are linked as references where added.

For an example of how we may proceed with feature-specific designs, see https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/80. In this structure:

- docs/design/README.md mentions interoperability, with a light overview.
  - The light overview is not yet in https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/80.
- docs/design/interoperability/README.md goes into more depth on interoperability, covering key points of the approach.
- Individual files in docs/design/interoperability/* go into more depth on interoperability.

Simple designs may not have a subdirectory. All current feature-specific designs do not -- they may be moved later.
2020-07-30 11:37:15 -07:00

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Files, libraries, and packages

Table of contents

TODO

This is a skeletal design, added to support the overview. It should not be treated as accepted by the core team; rather, it is a placeholder until we have more time to examine this detail. Please feel welcome to rewrite and update as appropriate.

Alternatives

File extensions

The use of 6c as a short file extension or top-level CLI (with subcommands below it similar to git or go) has some drawbacks. There are several other possible extensions / commands:

  • cb: This collides with several acronyms and may not be especially memorable as referring to Carbon.
  • c6: This seems a weird incorrect ordering of the atomic number and has a bad (if extremely obscure) Internet slang association (NSFW, use caution if searching, as with too much Internet slang).
  • carbon: This is an obvious and unsurprising choice, but also quite long.

This seems fairly easy for us to change as we go along, but we should at some point do a formal proposal to gather other options and let the core team try to find the set that they feel is close enough to be a bikeshed.