1. real world value; data structures tangent
- Posted by Alan Tu <ATU5713 at COMPUSERVE.COM>
Mar 13, 1999
-
Last edited Mar 14, 1999
Thanks, Ralf. By the way, a tangent message. It is really good to learn=
programming, not Euphoria specific. One really should take a programming=
class to learn appropriate data structures. Euphoria gives you
flexibility, but you need to know how to use it. Its like giving you the=
tools to build a fine house, but you don't know how. I realized this was=
my problem. I am a great syntax person, if I do say so myself. But I di=
d
not know how to build data structures which I could exploit and use to do=
whatever I wanted. And I'm still trying to figure it out, although I've
just written a program that does the exploiting I'm talking about.
Alan
=
2. Re: real world value; data structures tangent
>One really should take a programming
>class to learn appropriate data structures. Euphoria gives you
>flexibility, but you need to know how to use it. Its like giving you the
>tools to build a fine house, but you don't know how. I realized this was
>my problem. I am a great syntax person, if I do say so myself. But I did
>not know how to build data structures which I could exploit and use to do
>whatever I wanted. And I'm still trying to figure it out, although I've
>just written a program that does the exploiting I'm talking about.
I realized that recently myself, and I'm learning too. Really
fascinating when you get to the deeper aspects of theory, isn't it? (A
belated thanks to the people who responded to my question about references
awhile back.) I also found another good one: "Algorithmics: The Spirit of
Computing" by David Harel. It had another version of the 'minimal language'
with 4 instructions, capable of performing any computational task.
The difference between Rob's version being that this one had a
conditional, but not a loop, and Rob's had a loop but not a conditional. But
they're both actually capable of the same things. Working out a division
function was quite an exercise...
On a somewhat related note, I was playing with the preprocessors and
simple language interpreters written in Euphoria one night when that chapter
reoccurred to me. All languages are basically equal, so preprocessors,
translators, and interpreters could be generated programmatically. And
Euphoria seems to me an especially good language for it, due to the data types
and sequence ops. I found a couple of programs for doing it, lex and yacc,
and read through the docs a couple of times. There are versions for C and
Pascal Anyone else thought of doing a Euphorian version? It's another
project for my someday list.
:)
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Why not reinvent the wheel...it's a good invention...
