The Design of the SIMPLE Programming Language

Thousands of programming languages have been designed to meet different demands of application. Among the languages, many have been proposed merely for research exploration, while others have been developed for industrial software productions. Whatever the languages are targeted for, they are vehicles for implementing solutions in software engineering. Therefore, it is vital criteria to evaluate a language by principles of software engineering. But to our best knowledge, modern languages, especially the newly designed ones, are mostly designed to address domain-specific requirements, instead of focusing on the basic principles of software engineering. Thus, we develop a general-purpose language, SIMPLE, which supports the concise concepts adhering to the fundamental software engineering principles. To this end, simplicity, readability, reliability, security, scalability, and efficiency are established as goals of the language and various modular language features are provided. In this paper, we introduce the design of SIMPLE and discuss how its language features comply with the software engineering principles.