1. Re: What's Holding Euphoria Back
-- David Cuny
>Obviously, there is no trivial fix for this. I had investigated putting
>together a pre-processor for structures some time back, but dropped it when
>it became apparent that because of their recursive nature, it would be
>impossible to resolve structures until run time.
Regarding namespace, that's right. But I've been playing with parsing
and translation, in hopes of creating a multiline macro preprocessor that
would allow people to create their own language constructs...structures, class
declarations, block comments, etc. And, sure enough, I found a simple way of
translating pseudocode structure definitions into true Euphoria syntax:
struct car
string make
string model
atom miles
object owner
end struct
translates to:
constant make = 1, model = 2, miles = 3, owner = 4
type car( object v )
if sequence( v ) then
if length( v ) = 4 then
if string( v[make] ) then
if string( v[model] ) then
if atom( v[miles] ) then
return( TRUE )
end if --miles
end if --model
end if --make
end if --structure size
end if --sequence
return( FALSE )
end type
The same pattern works for all complex structures I can think of,
assuming the types of the elements have been predefined (string in this case).
It's repetitive and ugly to type out by hand, but easy with a simple
translator. And usage is normal, as they are Euphorian sequences. Since they
translate to Euphorian type-declarations, they can be elements of each other,
and themselves.
struct squad
car squadcar
object troops
end struct
car Acar
Acar[make] = Ford
Acar[model] = Mustang
squad SquadA
SquadA[squadcar] = Acar
But, as you said, it's not really a trivial task.
