OpenEuphoria

Structures

• Posted by Mathew Hounsell <mat.hounsell at MAILEXCITE.COM> Apr 24, 1998
• 433 views

Wash your mouths out with soap people.

Let us be honest, the thought of changing Euphoria probablely brings ROB out, at
least, in a cold sweat, after all it was his thesis.

So...
Rob doesn't want to hange Euphoria.
The sequence and lack of a million and one data types is what makes Euphoria sim
ple.

Type is what makes Euphoria more powerful.

Thus an extention of type would increases Euphorias power, and possiblely it's e
ffiency,
and wouldn't send Rob into fits.

It should be simple.

I have two suggestions:
length is/of i
elements are (atoms/integers/objects/sequences)

length would cause a type check failure if you wanted to exceded it and elements
would cause a type check failure if you tried to set a different type to the seq
uence.


That above option could then be used in the following, hardered to implemement s
uggestion...

        _The complex Data Type_

It would basically be a C structure of your design, but maybe with the possibili
ty
to use sequences. See the previous ideas have suggested that you define a struct
ure,
but a structure doesn't fit within the context of the atom being the base data t
ype
and the sequence being a thing to put lots of them in.

        type description( sequence s )
                elements are integers
                length is 256

                return 1
        end type

        type menu_str( sequence s )
                elements are integeres
                length is 16

                return 1
        end type
        -- because menu str is always 16 ints mem can be
    -- pre-assigned

        complex menu_item ( sequence s)
                format { menu_str, integer, string, integer }

                return 1
        end complex

I suggested implementing a length keyword rather than using :
        type six_elmnt_seq( sequence s)
                return length(s) = 6
        end type
as it could pre-allocate memory for the type if it had a fixed element type. The
re
is one suggestion of a data type iplemented only in complex and that is byte to
save
space, when all we want is a string.

It would save error detection coding. ( My Aborted HTML help system got bogged d
own
in that.

-----
Sincerely,
Mathew Hounsell
Mat.Hounsell at mailexcite.com

"Death to the semi-colon"

Compiler Errors:
Line 1 : End of line reached without semi-colon (;)
Line 2 : End of line reached without semi-colon (;) etc




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