OpenEuphoria

Last night, finally, I installed the new version. I scanned the manual and played with a couple of libraries. Generally, I like the beast. It moves this marvellous Rob's creation from the seventies, where it was stuck for such a long time, deep into the nineties. It has a lot of sweet stuff in it. Unfortunately, also a lot of gratuitous fluff. Take, for an example, sequence.e. Functions like fetch and store look ridiculous to me. What can they do that a simple assignment cannot do hundred times faster? On the other hand I expected to see generic sequence shuffle. It is short and fast, and no self-respecting simulation can live without it. But is not there, and people so often get it wrong... We also have stacks and queues. Never mind any retard can successfully tackle one of these - euphoria seems to be designed for them. When it comes to non-obvious, very basic structures like binary, ternary and red-black trees, the libraries are silent. Euphoria has some clever optimizations of special cases, but I am still hoping for 'passing of parameters by reference' that would save a lot of unnecessary copying when dealing with complex structures. It would also sit better with things like built-in swap routine, or even really, really fast native shift and rotate functions. Did I mention the demise of the moronic 31-bit integers? Perhaps in the next version...

jiri