Re: Constructive criticism
- Posted by kinz Mar 06, 2009
- 1099 views
But it is totaly outdated. Any knowledgeable programmer will sneer at it, and will have uselessly negative impressions about the language.
IMHO the whole section should be removed. If some part of it has to go in some "history" section, fine. But not inside the manual.
CChris
Hi CChris,
I think you are talking about that 2.3 section, yes?
Let's inspect it literally, which statement is outdated or wrong.
Maybe, such an inspection will be useful for some new
"history" section, as you say.
Explain please, what was wrong in 1993 or is outdated now:
"By basing Euphoria on this one, simple, general, recursive data structure, a tremendous amount of the complexity normally found in programming languages has been avoided. The arrays, structures, unions, arrays of records, multidimensional arrays, etc. of other languages can all be easily represented in Euphoria with sequences. So can higher-level structures such as lists, stacks, queues, trees etc.
Furthermore, in Euphoria you can have sequences of mixed type; you can assign any object to an element of a sequence; and sequences easily grow or shrink in length without your having to worry about storage allocation issues. The exact layout of a data structure does not have to be declared in advance, and can change dynamically as required. It is easy to write generic code, where, for instance, you push or pop a mix of various kinds of data objects using a single stack. Making a flexible list that contains a variety of different kinds of data objects is trivial in Euphoria, but requires dozens of lines of ugly code in other languages.
Data structure manipulations are very efficient since the Euphoria interpreter will point to large data objects rather than copy them.
Programming in Euphoria is based entirely on creating and manipulating flexible, dynamic sequences of data. Sequences are it - there are no other data structures to learn. You operate in a simple, safe, elastic world of values, that is far removed from the rigid, tedious, dangerous world of bits, bytes, pointers and machine crashes.
Unlike other languages such as LISP and Smalltalk, Euphoria's "garbage collection" of unused storage is a continuous process that never causes random delays in execution of a program, and does not pre-allocate huge regions of memory.
The language definitions of conventional languages such as C, C, Ada, etc. are very complex. Most programmers become fluent in only a subset of the language. The ANSI standards for these languages read like complex legal documents.
You are forced to write different code for different data types simply to copy the data, ask for its current length, concatenate it, compare it etc. The manuals for those languages are packed with routines such as "strcpy", "strncpy", "memcpy", "strcat", "strlen", "strcmp", "memcmp", etc. that each only work on one of the many types of data.
Much of the complexity surrounds issues of data type. How do you define new types? Which types of data can be mixed? How do you convert one type into another in a way that will keep the compiler happy? When you need to do something requiring flexibility at run-time, you frequently find yourself trying to fake out the compiler.
In these languages the numeric value 4 (for example) can have a different meaning depending on whether it is an int, a char, a short, a double, an int * etc. In Euphoria, 4 is the atom 4, period. Euphoria has something called types as we shall see later, but it is a much simpler concept.
Issues of dynamic storage allocation and deallocation consume a great deal of programmer coding time and debugging time in these other languages, and make the resulting programs much harder to understand. Programs that must run continuously often exhibit storage "leaks", since it takes a great deal of discipline to safely and properly free all blocks of storage once they are no longer needed.
Pointer variables are extensively used. The pointer has been called the "go to" of data structures. It forces programmers to think of data as being bound to a fixed memory location where it can be manipulated in all sorts of low-level, non-portable, tricky ways. A picture of the actual hardware that your program will run on is never far from your mind. Euphoria does not have pointers and does not need them."
Regards,
Igor Kachan
kinz@peterlink.ru
