OpenEuphoria

Re: Standard library praise and challenge

• Posted by DerekParnell (admin) Sep 13, 2011
• 3288 views

I give you an empty bag and ask you to pull out the largest object. You can't pull out any object so therefore this is an error. The results are defined - you pull nothing out, which is of course neither the biggest nor the smallest, thus we have a problem - also known as an error situation. One way to signal this error is to just give back the bag.

It's clear that math:max() is intended to only work with numbers, but I think we need max/min functions that work with objects too.

public function max(object a) 
    object b,c 
 
    if atom(a) then 
        return a 
    end if 
 
    if length(a) = 0 then 
        return a 
    end if 
 
    b = a[1] 
    for i = 2 to length(a) do 
        c = a[i] 
        if compare(c, b) > 0 then 
            b = c 
        end if 
    end for 
 
    return b 
end function