1. Re: Built-ins, PDFs, and Standards/Future of Euphoria
- Posted by MindVentur at AOL.COM
Feb 03, 1999
On built-ins... you can have the appearance of more built-in functions and
simplify user's lives with preprocessing -- scan the source for and add in
the appropriate files before compiling.
There's no reason PDFs have to be an either or situation. You can create HTML
from most word processors the same way you would create PDFs -- you print to a
driver. There's no reason why both HTML and PDF versions of the manuals
couldn't be included. PDFs are the standard today for e-books because it's
paper friendly and you can create a document that almost anybody can read and
most-importantly print out with an accurate table of contents, indexes etc.
Due to the graphical nature, there is a cost of machine overhead, but with
300mhz systems hitting the $500 mark, few people are sticking with their old
systems.
If euphoria is going to continue to grow, I think it needs to embrace newer
technologies or at least today's standards (SVGA and fast graphic and sound
routines that could come with the base package aren't all that "new").
Ultimately, old standards and hardware die. Trying to focus on supporting them
almost to exclusion might get some initial support in the short-term but those
efforts would be doomed in the long term because that hardware will become
extinct.
Why couldn't euphoria for windows support directX in a user-friendly way?
Reasonable code could be set to use direct draw, play, sound etc. using
wrappers to Microsoft's libraries. Those wrappers could come with euphoria for
windows and the basic functions and procedures could be expanded to support
SVGA, input, and fast/flexible graphics and sound routines. This would keep
with the concepts of making euphoria simple and easy to program in, give it
powerful new commands, and eliminate some of the problems with watcom's slow
graphics routines.
The selling point to any language for me is that I want to see evidence that
it can be used to create professional, state-of-the-art (or awful close to
it), software -- just like the programs you buy in stores. Giving me demo
programs focusing on character based graphics and low-res VGA screens isn't
going to peak my interest. I think most people are like that. I doubt many
people would get excited about writing programs that would have been state of
the art five or ten years ago. We live in a multimedia world. As much as it
would be nice for people to look at the quality of the code behind a program,
they won't. They'll use harder software to do simpler tasks simply because it
looks nicer.
Just my $.02
McGrew
