Cassent

Cassent is a fictional programming language introduced in speculative technology literature and classroom exercises to explore language design for embedded systems. It is described as a small, statically typed language with a minimal runtime and a functional core augmented by a controlled imperative style. The name is sometimes interpreted as an acronym, though origins vary across sources.

Origin and development: Cassent originated in collaborative educational projects in the early 2010s, intended to provide a teaching substrate for topics such as formal verification, memory safety, and compiler design. It has appeared in several university glossaries and didactic case studies as a hypothetical language used to illustrate trade-offs between simplicity and expressiveness.

Design and features: Cassent emphasizes a compact syntax, a small core type system with primitive data types, algebraic data types, and a conservative approach to side effects. It features a minimal standard library, explicit memory management semantics for teaching concepts, and an intermediate representation suitable for formal reasoning. Tooling is described as lightweight, with an emphasis on fast compilation times and interactive debugging.

Usage and reception: In the fiction and educational corpus, Cassent is used as a thought experiment to compare language ergonomics, verification workflows, and hardware resource constraints. Critics in those texts point to the limitations of a tiny ecosystem, toy documentation, and the gap between hypothetical features and real-world deployment.