1. euFAQ request for comment
Hi,
I have "started" getting a FAQ ready for Euphoria and was hoping a
few people can check out my initial few Questions/Answers.
To have a preview look at:
http://rays-web.com/test/eufaq.htm
I'm just after some global type comments at this stage.
Note: The rest of my site isn't ready yet so don't be surprised to
see very little else by following any links! :)
Thanks,
Ray Smith
http://rays-web.com
2. Re: euFAQ request for comment
On 10 Apr 2002, at 2:12, Ray Smith wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have "started" getting a FAQ ready for Euphoria and was hoping a
> few people can check out my initial few Questions/Answers.
>
> To have a preview look at:
>
> http://rays-web.com/test/eufaq.htm
>
> I'm just after some global type comments at this stage.
/me hands Ray a Round Tuit so he can spell-check the page asap!
Kat
3. Re: euFAQ request for comment
- Posted by euman at bellsouth.net
Apr 10, 2002
Ray, looking good!
I stopped in for a minute but I cant think of anything you left out.
Euman
euman at bellsouth.net
...if the US Government were ever to get really serious about Internet
security, the top players in Microsoft's management hierarchy would find
themselves handcuffed, blindfolded, led onto a tarmac within some obscure
Air Force base, and shot.
-- Thomas C Greene (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23223.html)
-- Kat will like this one!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Bensler" <bensler at mail.com>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 2:41 AM
Subject: RE: euFAQ request for comment
>
>
> Ray Smith wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have "started" getting a FAQ ready for Euphoria and was hoping a
> > few people can check out my initial few Questions/Answers.
> >
> > To have a preview look at:
> >
> > http://rays-web.com/test/eufaq.htm
> >
> > I'm just after some global type comments at this stage.
> >
> > Note: The rest of my site isn't ready yet so don't be surprised to
> > see very little else by following any links! :)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Ray Smith
> > http://rays-web.com
> >
>
> Looking Good Ray,
>
> I think that you should point out that those are your opinions. In
> particular 1.7. Everyone will have a different opinion of what features
> are prevelant and which are missing.
>
> I don't agree that EU lacks OOP. It lacks native OOP support, but
> there are quite a few good OOP libraries in the archives. Same for DB
> support, but I don't even agree that it should be supported natively.
>
> I think cdecl_ DLL support should be in there, and COM support.
>
>
> Chris
>
>
>
>
4. Re: euFAQ request for comment
- Posted by euman at bellsouth.net
Apr 10, 2002
Matt its unfortunate that CDECL support doesnt work....
let me rephrase that, I cant get it to work so I doubt a
newby will. although, I think my problem with your library
is because my .dll is compiled as Diamond-API which may
be totally different than a standard cdecl.
Euman
euman at bellsouth.net
...if the US Government were ever to get really serious about Internet
security, the top players in Microsoft's management hierarchy would find
themselves handcuffed, blindfolded, led onto a tarmac within some obscure
Air Force base, and shot.
-- Thomas C Greene (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23223.html)
-- Kat will like this one!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Lewis" <matthewwalkerlewis at YAHOO.COM>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 5:38 AM
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Chris Bensler [mailto:bensler at mail.com]
>
> > I think that you should point out that those are your opinions. In
> > particular 1.7. Everyone will have a different opinion of
> > what features
> > are prevelant and which are missing.
> >
> > I don't agree that EU lacks OOP. It lacks native OOP support, but
> > there are quite a few good OOP libraries in the archives. Same for DB
> > support, but I don't even agree that it should be supported natively.
> >
> > I think cdecl_ DLL support should be in there, and COM support.
>
> Which are also supported through libraries in the archives. :)
>
> Matt Lewis
5. Re: euFAQ request for comment
On Wed, 10 Apr 2002 02:12:58 +0000, Ray Smith <smithr at ix.net.au>
wrote:
>I have "started" getting a FAQ ready for Euphoria and was hoping a
>few people can check out my initial few Questions/Answers.
What are the limitations of the free public domain edition?
Tracing allows you to single-step through each line of code (starting
at a particular line or when a specific condition is detected). The
public domain version disables this feature once your program exceeds
300 statements.
Profiling allows you to record the number of times each line of code
is executed, or the percentage of time spent executing each line of
code. You can then use this information to improve the performance of
your program. In the public domain edition, this feature is completely
disabled.
Otherwise, the free public domain edition is fully functional with no
time limitations.
How do I search the archives?
You can search for a particular application or library by visiting
http://www.rapideuphoria.com/archive.htm
and typing in search keywords, for example "mp3" lists three entries:
an mp3 filename sorter, a wrapper for WinAmp, and a utility to add
tags to mp3 files.
You can search the archived message board for any topic discussed
since 1998 by visiting
http://www.rapideuphoria.com/listserv.htm
and entering keywords for the topic to see what has been said about it
in the past.
Pete
7. Re: euFAQ request for comment
- Posted by euman at bellsouth.net
Apr 12, 2002
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Smith" <smithr at ix.net.au>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: euFAQ request for comment
>
> Hi,
>
> I have "started" getting a FAQ ready for Euphoria and was hoping a
> few people can check out my initial few Questions/Answers.
Hi Ray I found this in some old stuff I have and thought you might find it to be
of use in your FAQ .
I did not write this and do not want any recognition.
Introduction
This article was written to provide a complete and comprehensive perspective on
the programming language Euphoria, unlike
most articles, which seem very ignorant towards most elegance of Euphoria.
Euphoria is a 32-bit programming language currently available for both the win32
and the dos32 platform. It doesn't have
many
"bells and whistles", but has a very fanatic group of users. It has both a
shareware version and a low-priced complete
version. The only limitation of the shareware version is the 300-statement limit
on extensive explanation when a run-time
error occurs.
Unfortunately most people take a look at Euphoria, and put it in the category
"scripting languages" or maybe once in a
while
somebody actually tries it and then considers it to be a good alternative to
basic. However, most people do not give
Euphoria
a good chance to prove itself nor do they think about its elegance at all.
Placing Euphoria
Euphoria is a third generation language; you have to tell it how to solve a
programming problem. Although some programming
languages claim to be of the fourth generation, they are usually not.
Euphoria itself has only claimed to be a functional language. It does not claim
to be object oriented but I have to
disagree
with that. It does not force you to program object-oriented nor does it have any
specific syntax that would distinguish
object-oriented code from procedural code. Yet, its scope rules and flexible
data structures allow you to simulate any
method
of programming including object-oriented. Not because there are specific
object-oriented statements, but because you can do
a
lot with a few statements in Euphoria. You could consider Euphoria to be more
than object-oriented, because you have a lot
of
freedom of programming style. In my honest opinion, you have more freedom of
programming style than you will have with any
other language. That is indeed only because of the flexible and generic language
definition. The only one to force a
certain
data structure is the programmer itself.
Euphoria is a bit more system-specific than, for example, Java. Although the
documentation clearly points out which
routines
are system dependent. Unlike all the other routines, misuse of these routines
can, of course, cause a crash, which will
usually be caught by the built-in memory extender or generate a protection fault
in windows.
Like Java, Euphoria is interpretive language, and does not need any compilation
at all. It will therefore never crash, but
always end your program with a clear message identifying what went wrong, why it
went wrong and usually what you could do
to
fix it. However because of its interpretive nature, some errors are not caught
before the code is executed, like a division
by a zero valued constant, which some compilers do point out as an error during
compilation. Unlike most interpreters,
Euphoria is extremely fast, however this is due not only to its speed per
statement, but also by the fewer statements you
need to perform generic tasks.
At first sight, Euphoria looks like a scripting language, an alternative to
basic or another lisp clone. Those first sights
are right, but not complete. Euphoria can be used as a scripting language,
because of its interpretive nature and because
you
can have statements on the upper level. The 92 statements are very close to real
English and Euphoria syntax does not
include
any weird acronyms or symbols, although at some places, technical or more common
expressions are used. There is no need to
add to the complex jargon of programming, and they didn't.
It is a lot faster than basic, has generic routines, nice debugging features and
is easy to install. Therefore it is a
great
teaching language, and allows novice programmers to try out lots of stuff,
without confusing them too much.
As for lisp, at some times Euphoria does appear to have stolen some of Lisp's
nifty tricks. Nevertheless, most lisp clones
are put in a shame by Euphoria's performance. In addition, it even simplified
some of Lisp's childish and strange ways of
handling things. Strings are handled, as a separate data type by Lisp, while
Euphoria considers them to be sequences (a
one-dimensional array) containing ASCII values, so there is no need for special
string manipulation routines. You can use
the
standard manipulation methods you also use for any other sequence.
Structure of a program
Statements can be called, but always require the appropriate fixed number of
arguments. Functions can be called, like
statements, but have to assign or use the returned value. You are not allowed to
discard the value, you have to at least
assign it to something. You can use a dummy variable if you do wish to do so.
This is so you, and anyone else seeing your
code, will always be aware that you are discarding a value.
Variables can be local to a routine, local to a file, or global. When you define
a variable to be local to a routine, its
memory will be released at the end of a routine call. There is no way to declare
a variable static to a routine, but those
declared local to a file are always static and their memory is not released
until the interpreter can determine that they
are
no longer in use. Variables always have to be declared and initialized before
they can be used, unlike certain other
languages, i.e. BASIC, they are not quietly set to zero, you will always be able
to see which variable a certain routine,
or
file is using.
Routines can be declared local to a file or global. You can call a routine
recursively, but for mutual-recursion, routine
pointers are to be used. There are also a few built-in routines, but routines
for graphics, mouse, sorting, and pattern
matching are provided as include files. An 'include' file is just a normal
Euphoria program, but all globally defined
routines are exportable. If it contains top-level statements, they will be
executed at the point where the file is
included.
A top-level statement can include other files, but not inside any statement
block. There is thus no way to choose the file
you wish to include at run-time.
You can also declare a variable as a constant. The value can be calculated in
real-time, but once the constant is declared
the value is locked-in. You are not allowed to tell Euphoria of what type a
certain constant is. The data type will be
determined when you lock-in the value. Constants can only be declared local to a
file or global. Because they can not be
declared inside of routines, the interpreter still has the opportunity to put
the values strait into your code, and thereby
eliminating all overhead.
Variables and data types
Euphoria only knows two data types: the sequence, and the atom. An atom is
numeric value that will automatically use more
memory when its value no longer fits in the reserved memory. A sequence is a
list of objects. If you don't want your value
to
be converted to a floating-point value, because you can't afford to loose any
precision, you can limit this for a variable
by
declaring it as 'integer'. However, an integer in Euphoria can only contain
31-bit integer values. In addition, if you
want,
for example, a routine to be able to work with both sequences and atoms, you can
declare the variable as an 'object'. That
way, the variable can represent a sequence as well as an atom.
Sequences can contain other sequences and atoms. It can be subscripted & sliced.
Any calculation performed on a sequence
will
be performed on all of its elements. Any calculation with two sequences requires
the sequences to be of the same length. It
will then perform the calculation with the respective elements of each sequence.
The result will be a sequence of the same
length, containing the results of each individual calculation. This also occurs
when you compare two sequences, or when you
compare a sequence with an atom. Here is an example, which might make things
more clear for you:
Sequence 'foo' contains:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
'foo' adding 2 makes:
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
'foo' adding 'foo' makes:
6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16
'foo' < 10 evaluates:
1,1,0,0,0,0
Sequence 'bar' contains:
5,5,5
Slicing bar from 1 to 2 adding 3 makes bar:
8,8,5
The 2nd element of 'foo' adding bar makes foo:
1, { 10, 10, 7 }, 3, 4, 5, 6
Foo adding 4 makes foo:
5, {14, 14, 11 }, 7, 8, 9, 10
Characters are considered atoms, strings are considered sequences with atoms and
arrays are considered sequences with
sequences and eventually atoms. Sequences need not be pre-build like most
languages do with arrays. They can however grow
and
shrink in real-time. You have built-in functions to append and 'prepend'
elements to a sequence and you have the '&'
operator
to combine two sequences or a sequence and an atom. You can only slice and
subscript variables, but not expressions like a
function result or an evaluation. You would be discarding returned information,
which is not allowed. It usually is illegal
to slice or subscript a sequence out of its bounds. However there are certain
cases where this is allowed, for example when
you slice from the first element to last element minus 1, which would sometimes
mean, slicing from '1' to '-1'. That
expression would be legal. There are more cases like this where Euphoria shows
off its elegance. But you have to take my
word
for it.
Debugging
First, we will discuss error prevention. Syntax errors are avoided by using
straightforward English words. Even statement
blocks begin with 'do' and end with 'end function/procedure/type/while/for'.
Custom types can be used to avoid logical errors. Logical errors can usually be
blamed at certain variables containing
values
that they are not supposed to have, which sometimes result in a logical- and
sometimes in a run-time error. Types are
one-argument-functions, which name you can use to declare a variable. Whenever
the value of the variable changes the
function
is called and a type-check error will occur when that function returns false.
You can use such a function to make sure that
a
certain variable contains at least a legal value if not the desired value. You
can turn this type checking on and off at
the
top-level.
If an error does occur, you will get a nice English message from Euphoria, and a
file named 'EX.ERR' is generated which
contains a list of all variables and their values in a friendly and readable
format. If you had tracing on you will also
find
the last 25 lines traced by the interpreter. Both the file and the message will
have a suggestion to fix the error if
appropriate.
You can also trace your program, lookup some values of variables, and see your
program working step by step. You can turn
tracing on and off through a statement, so you can determine at run-time if you
want to go into trace mode. You could for
example check a variable for that value that seems to generate some error and
then activate the trace mode. You have to
specify which sections you want to trace. Therefore, you do not have to step
through code that already works. Those lines
excluded in trace-mode will be executed without waiting for a key-press. It
seems to me, that Euphoria's tracing
capabilities
are quite extensive and puts other tracers in a shame. The trace-mode even has
syntax coloring!
Platforms
Currently, there are two platforms available: Win32 and Dos32. Both run in
32-bit protected mode and have access to all the
computers memory: conventional, extended and virtual. The Dos32 platform will
make its own swap-file for virtual memory if
it
is not running under Windows 95. The different platforms are provided within one
package. It will contain only two
executables. These are the interpreters for each platform. There are more tools
available, but they are all provided as
Euphoria source code and can be executed by either interpreter. You will find
many example programs, a complete developing
environment and some other useful tools.
The Dos32 platform has platform-specific routines for manual allocation,
de-allocation, poking, peeking and calling machine
code. The Win32 platform has platform-specific routines for message-boxes,
creating windows and calling DLL's. Thankfully,
extensive libraries to do all the window-magic are already available. You really
do not want to write a windows-based
program
by manually calling zillions of DLL functions.
All programs not using platform-specific routines will work on both platforms.
Platform specific routines will not generate
an error on the other platform unless they are actually executed. You can lookup
the platform by calling the platform
function and choose which statement you want to execute based upon the value
returned by the platform function.
Distribution
You can distribute your programs royalty-free in three ways. You can provide the
source code and the public domain version
of
the interpreter. This is quite an efficient way if you have multiple programs.
However, if you do not want people to see the source code, you could shroud your
program. Shrouding will combine the main
program file and all include files into one file. All keywords will be
tokenized, all comments removed and all variables
and
local routine names will be renamed to short cryptic names. You can even
optionally hide all the strings and have your code
encrypted.
In addition, if you only have one program to distribute, you could make an
executable by binding it. Binding will combine
the
shrouded version of your program with the interpreter into one executable.
Conclusion
Any programming style is possible due to the flexibility of sequences. You could
for example, program in a truly object
oriented manner by keeping all the declarations within a file local except for
one global function, named after the class.
That function gets a message as argument, and uses handles for different
instances. The instance-specific data of those
instances can be looked up in a local sequence with the handle. Nevertheless,
there are many more (practical) ways to
program
object oriented in Euphoria.
Euphoria can serve as a great teaching language, hiding all the pointers and
machine specific garbage, so you can
concentrate
on algorithms and programming styles.
Euphoria is a great scripting language, because the syntax is almost completely
English. You do not need to use any weird
format. You are not forced to use routines. You do not need to compile.
Euphoria is great for small programs. You can quickly make solid, safe code in
Euphoria fast, that is easy maintainable and
does not need extensive debugging and bug-checking before you can be certain it
will work.
Euphoria is great for big commercial programs. Those pieces that need the extra
performance compiled languages give you,
can
be coded in machine code or put in a DLL. Your program will be developed fast,
and there will be little time needed to
catch
all the bugs. Consider a bug-free program developed in one-fifth of the time it
would take in C++. Not to mention all the
time spent on getting those damn bugs out. I do not have to tell you how much
money this can save a company. In addition,
the
company's name will be known for its solid programs. Your programs need not be
followed by 200 bug-fixes later. Because
Euphoria code is so generic, you can use your code repeatedly. The executable
file will be relatively small. It will be
almost impossible for someone to hack your program. And, as stated before, you
can distribute your program royalty-free.
Because of its simplicity and lack of numerous "bells and whistles", Euphoria is
often dismissed by professional and
amateur
programmers. There are currently only a small number of users worldwide. That
means there are relatively few people who can
maintain your Euphoria code, something most clients do not appreciate. The only
way this situation can change is for more
people to begin using Euphoria.
More information
"The Official Euphoria Programming Page":
http://members.aol.com/FilesEU
"Pete's Euphoria Zone":
http://www.harborside.com/home/x/xseal/euphoria/
"Irv's Euphoria Archive":
http://www.mindspring.com/~mountains/
"The Euphoria Consortium":
http://frontpage.cdc.net/blackdog/
"A beginners guide to Euphoria":
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/4346/
Author
The article has been written by a 16 years Old Dutch Euphorian using some
suggestions that Irv Mullins made. This article
may
be freely published in unchanged form. Although I would appreciate being
notified first.
Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen
Nieuwen at xs4all.nl
Euman
euman at bellsouth.net
...if the US Government were ever to get really serious about Internet
security, the top players in Microsoft's management hierarchy would find
themselves handcuffed, blindfolded, led onto a tarmac within some obscure
Air Force base, and shot.
-- Thomas C Greene (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/23223.html)
-- Kat will like this one!
