1. Re: Portability
- Posted by Everett Williams <rett at GVTC.COM>
Nov 04, 1999
-
Last edited Nov 05, 1999
On Thu, 4 Nov 1999 16:53:32 -0800, Cuny, David at DSS <David.Cuny at DSS.CA.GOV>
wrote:
>
>No, if you check the archives you'll see that we're treading old ground.
>
Sorry for that, but I have read most of a years worth of this list in trying
to catch up and almost 2 years worth on the subject of namespaces. Their is
a limit to how much that I can plough through, especially since searches
many times yield half conversations. Thanks for your patience, anyway.
>> Till I have done some reading, further comment
>> would be useless except to say that I am looking
>> for a straightforward, "FoxPro" level interface
>> suitable for business applications without regard
>> to games or fancy graphics.
>
>Both of the GUI libraries (VEL and Win32Lib) should work just fine, then. I
>am working on a portable library (called Llama) that currently runs under
>Win32 and Linux (using GTK), but it's fairly low on my priority list right
>now.
>
I think both of the libraries represent a huge amount of work of very high
quality within the limits of what the language offers for interfacing with
outside facilities. I probably will use one of them if I must do a project
short term.
>
>> One way of improving the portability of a lot of things
>> in Euphoria would be a simple rule not allowing the usage
>> of things like routine_id(), peek, or poke in the mainline
>> of code.
>
>I don't think most people care about their code being portable. They code
in
>DOS (or Windows), and write applications for those environments. There are
>no 'perfect' libraries, and they always lag behind the cool features the
>people want to implement in their programs.
Writing for DOS is a gamer's only world except for the fact that Euphoria
has more facilities in many areas in DOS than it does in Windows. That has
caused several things(like editors) to be written in DOS that probably
should have been written in Windows in an ideal world(did I just say that
anything was ideal about Windows..apologies..but you know what I mean).
Anyway, cool means little to me. I still use a lot of command line level
utilities to accomplish my daily tasks. The one thing that I like about NT
is the availability of almost all functions through the command line
facility.
>
>-- David Cuny
What you say about those on the list is largely true..you would, in any
case, know better than I. Portability is not an end in and of itself. Code
written with no eye towards portability typically dies an early death based
on changes in the environment that it was written for...never mind any other
environment. In the byte-code world of Java, far from ideal, there is an
attempt to isolate programmers from the effects of local environmental
change. Changes in Java map to all environments that it runs in requiring
only one set of changes(theoretically). With the cost of programming time,
anything that extends the life of programs and improves their
readability/modifiability will have a momentum of it's own. The reason that
Euphoria is attractive is it's simplicity/readability/modifiability.
Isolating code vulnerable to environmental change or change in environment
just makes sense..no matter what environment you program for. Your library
is a one step remove from the environment. I would just like to take that
extra step away.
Everett L.(Rett) Williams
rett at gvtc.com
