OpenEuphoria

2. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by DerekParnell (admin) May 15, 2009
• 1211 views

Hi, glad to have you around. There are lots of helpful people around and plenty of useful tips and thought-provoking discussions.

Excellent! Don't be worried about asking 'noob' questions. We all have to start somewhere.

There are no silly questions even though there is sometimes sily answers. So jump in freely.

Absolutely. It is a good learning language, as well as being serious enough for commercial applications, if that's your desire.

It not suitable for rendering real-time 3D animations, or anything that requires massive amounts of processing power. Euphoria is primarily an interpreter rather than a compiler. It converts your programs into a special format which is then run by an 'emulated' machine. This makes it easy to write a program that runs on different platforms without changing anything.

Compilers on the other hand, convert your program into machine language which is specific to one platform and computer architecture.

Even though interpreted programs run slower than compiled ones, the Euphoria interpreter is extremely fast - much faster than well known interpreters such as Ruby, Python, Perl, and Javascript.

However, Euphoria also comes with a tool that converts your program into the C programming language which can then be compiled to make it run even faster.

One of its most defining features is the simple data type system in Euphoria. The 'sequence' is extremely versatile and simple. An 'object' can hold any sort of data you like. A 'sequence' is a variable length list of objects. There are only really two data types in Euphoria - numbers and lists. Numbers are divided into 'atoms', which can hold any type of number, and 'integers' which can only hold integers (surprise, surprise). The reason for the 'integer' type is that for certain things it can make programs run a lot faster, but the choice is up to you. That's it - the whole type Euphoria system.

In Euphoria, text is just a sequence of integers - one for each character. But to make it easier to write and read, you can use single characters in single quotes - 'q' - or whole text strings using double quotes - "Euphoria".

-- Sample 
sequence name = "Euphoria" 
puts(1, name) -- Write whole name to screen 
puts(1, name[2]) -- Write only the second character to screen 
puts(1, name[3 .. 5]) -- Write slice starting from 3rd character to 5th character inclusive. 

Agreed, they do need improvement. We are in the process of preparing the next version of Euphoria for release, and we'd love help in improving the documentation. There are some improvements coming but more are welcome.

There is a project called 'Think Euphoria' being developed by a member of the OpenEuphoria team that will be available with v4. You can have a look at a draft of it (very incomplete).

Also, I can provide a step-by-step programming example if you'd like one.

4. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by cmr May 20, 2009
• 1035 views

Being in a similar position to rowrasaur, I'd like to echo the comments about making the tutorials more beginner-friendly. Can I also put in a request (I think I mentioned this before) for a tutorial specifically about producing an elementary program using the IDE. I like your IDE a lot, but getting at the information I need even for a simple program is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I would say that, as a near-beginner and hobbyist, I'm finding Euphoria as a language easy to pick up. Even if I have to leave it for ages owing to lack of time, I don't come back to it and find I've forgotten what I learned before. I'm sure it'll meet all my needs. I'll never reach an advanced enough stage to know if it can meet everybody's needs, but it obviously doesn't meet Critic's. Every thread I've looked at so far on this forum seems to end in a lengthy argument with Critic, it's getting tedious. Don't you have any provisions for banning people from the forum so as to leave the forum free for those who just genuinely want to make the most of Euphoria?

6. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by cmr May 21, 2009
• 1076 views

Thank you for your comments. Yes, obviously programming from a GUI point of view is a different ball game and the actual language isn't the sole consideration any more - that's why I think it would be helpful to have an introductory guide to bringing the two together. I'm amazed at what you can do with the IDE, it's very comprehensive so there's obviously going to be a lot of information to pack in - it's just finding the bits you're most likely to need in the early stages, for example the GUI equivalents of "print" and "puts", so you can get something simple up and running quickly. It's a psychological thing as much as anything, I suppose, and I admit I'm not the most patient type!

The language tutorials themselves are basically very good, it just needs to be made clear at the outset that (a) you need something like "atom a" and "a = getc(0)" to stop the console disappearing and (b) to get that to work you also need to put in "include get.e" at the beginning of the program.

Perhaps there could be a separate branch of the forum specifically for newbies so we can sift out the basic things more quickly and leave the technical arguments to the advanced people?

8. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by rowrasaur May 28, 2009
• 929 views

Hey,

Thanks to whoever cleared the gargabe out of this thread.

Just a small question for anybody who can answer:

The short version is: how do I convert ascii text in a sequence to numerical atoms in a sequence?

Here's the long version

I'm trying to compare parts of two sequences.

An example of the first sequence would be something like {E,0,0}

The second would be something like { {70,0,0}, {69,0,0}, {68,0,0} }

I can't seem to get EU to recognize that sequence 1 is equal to the second sequence of sequence 2 (I thought it might see it as equal because the ascii code for "E" is 69)

So I'm assuming I need to convert the ascii value to an atom value. How do I do this?

10. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by irv May 28, 2009
• 935 views
• Last edited May 29, 2009

First of all, you cannot make a sequence {E,0,0}.

If you put single quotes around the 'E' then you can make a sequence, which is exactly the same as {69,0,0}

sequence s1,s2 
s1 = {'E',0,0} 
s2 = {{70,0,0},{69,0,0},{68,0,0}} 
 
if equal(s1,s2[2]) then 
        puts(1,"They are equal\n") 
else 
        puts(1,"They are not equal\n") 
end if 

12. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by DerekParnell (admin) May 29, 2009
• 951 views

Yes, it is easy to get equal() and compare() confused.

if compare(x,y) = 0 then 

is the same as

if equal(x,y) then 

14. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by andi Jun 12, 2009
• 970 views

Hi

I missed a week or so....

http://www.indonesianet.de/eu/abgte.html

I put this there for download and viewing. I gonna put the rest of the books also there if you think this okay. Maybe i should create a little start-page...

Bye

16. Re: Questions from a Beginner.

• Posted by andi Jun 13, 2009
• 837 views

You, can send them to andi(at)indonesianet(dot)de.

bye