Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Aug 07, 2008
- 1131 views
Hello all ...
Since I've been out of the Euphoria loop for a year or so, I'm taking some time here trying to get back up to speed. That being the case, I have a couple of questions. Sorry if this is old news, but I didn't see a "Search" button or anything of the like.
Sorry. The search button will be come around soon. This is a brand new forum system and it still has a bit to go to be fully functional.
A lot of these questions are prompted by the fact that I am working on a project that will most likely take long enough that version 4 will have a stable release before I get done.
So, of course, the first question is this: has there been any sort of "off-the-cuff" target date made for the release of version 4? If it is going to be three months from now, I might as well go ahead and get Version 4, and use that for my development. OTOH, if that's still a year out, I'd best stay with 3.1.
I would say that three months is a realistic time frame, maybe sooner. We are just about to release the first alpha. We are hoping that people will pick it up and bug test like crazy so that bug reports will come in quickly and soon after the release, not 2 days before we decide to release a final 
Are most Euphoria users at this point using 3.1 or 4.0?
I am sure most are on 3.1. 4.0 has not been released in any real binary form yet. I do make just the binaries available at http://jeremy.cowgar.com/eubins/ but you still have to get the non-binary files from svn, http://rapideuphoria.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rapideuphoria/trunk
And finally, I perused the docs and noticed that there are a lot of changes happening to the core of the language, such as platform() going away. Is there going to be backward compatibility or is Version 4 going to break code? That's fine if it is, but I'll need to plan to migrate my code.
platform() isn't really going away, but there will be very little real use for it with the new ifdef system in existence. It accomplishes everything platform() did and much, much more including better performance.
4.0 will break some code, but we expect it to be very little. The only areas that will break are if you use one of the new keywords or built-in routine names as an identifier yourself. For instance, we added entry and continue as new keywords in 4.0 and some people seem to have used those as variable names. You will have to change your variable names.
4.0 will come with all the old 3.x include files because all of the new standard library is now placed in C:\euphoria\include\std ... This will mean that the vast majority of 3.x apps will continue to run unaltered.
It looks like a lot of hard work has gone on in my absence! I'm looking forward to jumping back into the pool.
It's going to be a lot of fun! btw... you asked if most people are on 4.0, I said probably not, but I for one am so use to the 4.x features all of my code is 4.0. I think I forget how to program in anything < 4.0
Jeremy
