Re: 64bit support
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Mar 03, 2009
- 1091 views
Sorry, what does it do remarkably well? And please don't mention its performance: Even with the copy-on-write-optimization Euphoria copies sequences way to often, at least in the code examples I looked at (my practical experience with the language is limited).
Why would I not mention its performance? I agree that there are some cases where it would be nice to optimize the copy. That's one area we're working on right now. But in general, the performance is pretty good.
Apart from that the implementation seems to use a double indirection for accessing a sequence's element where a single indirection would suffice given the copying semantics.
By double vs single indirection, I can only guess that you're talking about the way it uses the symbol table, and object pointers. Could you be more specific?
Euphoria seems to be built on the mantra: "A simple programming language leads to simple programs." And this is wrong.
I agree that a simple programming language does not lead to simple programs. But I don't agree on that being a mantra of Euphoria:
] ] Euphoria is a simple, flexible, and easy-to-learn programming language. It lets you quickly and easily develop programs for Windows, DOS, Linux and FreeBSD.
I think you're confusing the program with the language. It's typically pretty easy to see what any piece of euphoria code is doingfrom a syntax/language, not algorithmic point of view. Compare that to C, or more pathologically, C++, where you can't even be sure of what operators do.
The complexity that Euphoria avoids, pops up in the programs written in Euphoria: Missing language features need to be emulated. (The need to "peek" and "poke" to access C's structs, for example.)
Yes, the lack of built-in structured memory access is something that would be nice to have. Interfacing with external code is definitely one area where, while possible, it often takes more work than with other languagesI've worked extensively doing this, and while it's certainly possible, there are undoubtedly some improvements that could be made.
Sequences only allow tree-like structures, general graphs cannot be implemented that easily. And reference counting means that graphs don't have GC support. Euphoria is only simple to learn because it lacks a whole bunch of useful features IMHO.
I suppose that if you tried to build, for example, a C-style implementation of a graph in euphoria, you'd certainly come to that conclusion. I can't figure out what you mean with respect to reference counting not garbage collecting a graph.
Euphoria is only simple to learn because it lacks a whole bunch of useful features IMHO.
Yes, it's not a tool suitable for every problem (let us know when you find it, please). I often find myself wishing for some Java or C/C or perl feature when coding in Euphoria. But then, I often wish for Euphoria features when coding in those other languages. What I like about euphoria is that it allows me to focus on an algorithm, without having to worry as much about other language details, but of course, YMMV.
Matt
