Re: Euphoria History
- Posted by robcraig Dec 15, 2010
- 2156 views
Hey,
Does anyone have the complete history of Euphoria? I would like to know it as I am writing a detailed manual on Euphoria and having the history would come in handy.
Here's a "history" that I emailed to someone in 2005...
A Brief History of Euphoria by Robert Craig Rapid Deployment Software
1975-77: I had summer jobs programming in APL while enrolled in the computer option of Engineering Science at the University of Toronto. I was impressed with the APL interpreter's dynamic storage allocation, and operations on multi-dimensional arrays, but I was not happy with APL's dependence on the goto statement for all control-flow.
1980: I finished my Master's Thesis in computer science at the University of Toronto. My thesis was a comparison of conventional programming languages versus newer functional languages like FP, proposed by John Backus. Euphoria gets the idea of atoms and sequences from FP, although in FP strings were considered atoms. Euphoria treats strings as sequences.
1981-1989: I had software development jobs working at Litton Systems on cruise missiles, AES Data writing an assembler and linker, IBM Canada developing compilers for C, Cobol and BASIC and Array Systems developing an Ada-like language for parallel processing.
September 1989: I bought an Atari Mega ST and started to develop Euphoria. My goal was to develop something with FP-like data structures, but very simple, conventional control-flow statements.
1989-1992: I continued to enhance Euphoria and to increase its speed. I managed to speed up the interpreter by a factor of 25 over the first working version.
July 1993: Euphoria version 1.0 was released to various BBS's as well as CompuServe and America Online.
January 1996: The Euphoria Web site was created.
June 1996: The Euphoria mailing list was started. The Web site and the mailing list allowed an interesting community of Euphoria users to develop. Many ideas proposed on the mailing list have been incorporated into Euphoria. Some of the major people in the community, such as David Cuny, Jiri Babor, Jacques Deschenes, and several others, have contributed extremely useful code that's now widely used. There has been an amazing amount of sharing of code and ideas.
November 1997: The first WIN32 version of Euphoria was released.
June 1999: The first "pre-alpha" Linux version was released.
November 1999: The first Linux version was officially released.
April 2000: The Euphoria Database System (EDS) was introduced.
June 2001: The Euphoria To C Translator was officially released. It will translate any Euphoria program to C, and can sometimes speed up a program by a factor of 5.
In the early days, I worked on Euphoria part-time, but for the past few years I've been working full-time on it. My wife, Junko Miura also works on Euphoria part time. She developed several library routines, the documentation generator and some demo programs. She also set up the Web site.
Why is Euphoria better than other languages? See README.DOC, REFMAN.DOC, BASIC.DOC, C.DOC.
Euphoria runs on DOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.
There are currently over 500 people subscribed to EUforum, the Euphoria mailing list (discussion group). (Some use Topica e-mail, others view and post messages via the new Web interface that's written in Euphoria.)
There are over 1400 user-contributed .ZIP files in our Archive. Since 1996, over 67,000 messages have been posted to EUforum.
Recently, Robert Craig rewrote the Euphoria To C Translator, in 100% Euphoria code. He also rewrote the official Euphoria interpreter as 30% Euphoria code (front-end), 70% C code (back-end). They were both formerly written 100% in C. The Translator can translate both itself and the interpreter front-end. The Interpreter can interpret both itself and the translator!
For version 2.5, there is also a completely open source version of Euphoria, that's written 100% in Euphoria itself. Interpreted, it runs much slower than the 30%/70% official interpreter, but you can translate it to get speed comparable to Perl or Python, both of which are written in carefully hand-coded C.
Regards, Rob Craig Rapid Deployment Software http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
