OpenEuphoria

Re: What's holding Euphoria back?

• Posted by Daniel Berstein <daber at PAIR.COM> Jan 31, 1999
• 402 views

At 12:33 p.m. 31-01-99 -0800, you wrote:

>That I understand...But what type checking is done on a sequence except
>when it is read from? The way i understood the setup of a sequence was
>all in the way it was read...That should do all the type checking that
>is needed...

Sorry but I don't understand you. Are you saying that it ain't important
how you store the data, but the way you read it?! I don't want to be
rude, but you're mistaken. The way you storage information and how you
retrive it are BOTH important. I'm an excellent spanish reader, but give
me a german book and I won't understand a word!

>The section that reads the sequence should know if its a
>text or numbers...I also under stat that writing to a sequence you need
>to know the kind og data that is there..again the program should know
>what kind of data it is...I guess I just dont get it...Just write the
>program in a way that you dont have a tex funtion reading a number data
>block and things should work(at least in my mind  it does...but then
>again there is no gravity in my mind so its a judgment call..)...

You're right here. It works... that's the way we do it now. That doesn't mean
it's the best way to do it. Sequences by definition are anarchist data
strcutures, they let you do the most inimaginable construct. That is GOOD,
and makes Euphoria unique. The problem is that real life problems need
real life solutions. Look at languages like Lisp, Scheme or Haskell, they
are great for investigation (AI, speech recognition, etc.), and rarely go
beyond
academic walls. Euphoria has a clear orientation to a practical solution tool.
To survive (and prospere) the real world Euphoria must adecuate.

>I do like the idea of formated sequences...

Me too ;)

>sequence aaaa{
>           number of people in the room
>           each persons name
>                {
>                number of people in the room
>                each persons name
>                there age
>                }
>             }
>
>the sequence is set up {XXX,{YYY,"name",ZZ)

I was thinking some kind of template:

template roommate
        {sequence name, integer age}
end template

template room
        {integer room_number, sequence roommates of roommate}
end template

sequence bedrooms of room

Now I can do:

sequence me of roommate
sequence myroom of room

me[name] = "Daniel Berstein"
me[age] = 25

myroom[room_number] = 101
myroom[roommates] = append(myroom[roommates], me)

bedrooms = append(bedrooms, myroom)

Can you see how this code is much more readable than the way we have
to do it now?

BTW A SizeOf() function would be helpful for I/O routines too.

>"john Q. plublic" has numbers for a name? there can be numbers in the
>name...just remember every thing is ascii....

I rember that all the time ;)


Regards,
        Daniel   Berstein
        daber at pair.com