1. Vacation
- Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com>
Apr 08, 2005
-
Last edited Apr 09, 2005
I'll be off-line for the next week.
--
Derek Parnell
Melbourne, Australia
irc://irc.sorcery.net:9000/euphoria
2. Vacation
Junko and I will be away for 10 days starting
Wednesday (another cruise).
Someone will be here to handle registrations
and upgrades, but no tech support. The RDS
Web site will be updated tonight if you have
any last-minute items to submit.
I expect to see some great new Euphoria programs
when I get back 
By the way, after converting Language Wars to mode 18
recently, I'm now leaning towards adding assignment
operators like C: += -= *= /=
e.g.
quadrant[shooter][Q_EN] = quadrant[shooter][Q_EN] + e
becomes:
quadrant[shooter][Q_EN] += e
It's shorter, more readable once you get used to it,
and in cases like above will be more efficient. Opportunities
to use this come up a lot, especially for +=
David Cuny's preprocessor has these operators already,
although he has them backwards from C ( =+ instead of
+= etc. ). Back in the 1970's C did them Cuny's way,
but they had to change it, to avoid a parsing problem.
In Euphoria you can currently say for instance,
x =+1 or x =-y and it means x = (+1) or x = (-y)
I don't see any ambiguities with += -= etc. for Euphoria
- let me know if you think of one!
I'm only considering the 4 arithmetic operators.
I don't plan to add:
&=
append=
++
--
or any others.
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://members.aol.com/FilesEu/
3. Re: Vacation
>By the way, after converting Language Wars to mode 18
>recently, I'm now leaning towards adding assignment
>operators like C: += -= *= /=
That would be just great! I've often wanted them when I've programmed with
e.g. 4D sequences (Okay, that is perhaps bad programming, but it happens).
Now, when we are allready into things to add to Euphoria, I would like to
repeat two suggestions that I particulary like:
1. Variable assignment on declarations:
integer c = 0, x, y, b = 1
2. Function return values to multiple variables:
{x, y, z} = GetPos()
I really think that nr 2 would add a lot to the language. All in my humble
rookie opinion, of course.
Einar
4. Re: Vacation
Robert wrote:
>recently, I'm now leaning towards adding assignment
>operators like C: += -= *= /=
Hurrah! (But see my whining later in this post...)
>David Cuny's preprocessor has these operators already,
>although he has them backwards from C
Yeah, I noticed this some time after I had released it. I decided that it
was too late to change it. Unlike Euphoria and C, PP *is* sensitive to white
space.
>I don't plan to add:
> &=
> append=
> ++
> --
>or any others.
Since '&' and 'append' are the basic sequence operators, it would be nice if
these were also represented. I would suspect that you could optimize these
calls so a sequence copy would not be requires, although you've hinted that
particular optimization would be available automatically for all functions.
-- begin whining --
Personally, I'm still in favor of this sort of syntax:
a.plus(12) -- a = a + 1 [actually, a = plus( a, 1 )]
a.append( "foo" ) -- a = append( a, "foo" )
a.concat( "bar" ) -- a = a & "bar" [ok, really a = concat( a, "bar" )
for ALL functions and procs. I think it's *better* than the 'op=' syntax,
because it's universal. The syntax is (IMHO) clean, natural, and doesn't
conflict with existing Euphoria syntax. You can write very OOP-ish code
without having the overhead of OOP. For example:
theWindow.grow( 10, 10 )
would convert to:
grow( theWindow, 10, 10 )
if 'grow' was a procedure, and:
theWIndow = grow( theWindow, 10, 10 )
if it were a function. If anyone is curious how this would work, my DOT
program implements this as a pre-processor. Robert. could you at least play
with it before deciding it's a bad idea? Preferably, when you're back from
vacation and in a very good mood... 
But I suspect that on this I'm alone in my beliefs.
-- end whining --
> I expect to see some great new Euphoria programs
> when I get back
I might be ready to release a pre-pre alpha of my latest project by then.
Don't bet on it, though...
Have a great time!
-- David Cuny
