OpenEuphoria

Structures

• Posted by MAP <ddhinc at ALA.NET> Mar 04, 1998
• 444 views

I have no doubt this has been covered in previous discussions
here, but I'm fairly new to Euphoria and wonder if someone
might labor over it again with me. Why doesn't Euphoria explicitly
provide a C-like structure? Granted, structures aren't as
flexible as sequences, they can't be reshaped at will, but
in many cases they don't need to be (and would be safer by
now being allowed to). I like Euphoria for it's easy readability,
and it's clean form that allows you to accomplish much more,
much more quickly, than programming an equivilant in C.
I think though that where structures are concerned Euphoria
falls down a bit. Implementing them as sequences puts the
burden on the programmer to design design it well and access
it in a readable form, which can often be more of a bother than
C's approach.
Also, with the new Win32 platform, porting the interfaces to
the DLL's is rather complex as well. A special type of struct
dedicated to C-style linkages would be of great benifit.
i.e. something like this:
C_STRUCT My_Structure{
  C_INT value1
  C_INT value2
  some_other_struct structure2
}

Allowing you to create a varaible that would automatically
allocate memory for, and point to, this structure that's in
a form readily passable to your external functions.
I think this, as well structures dedicated to euphorias
native types, would improve Euphoria alot; Making programs
more readable and easier to implement.

Christopher D. Hickman