Re: Keywords and Namesapces
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Oct 09, 2011
- 40170 views
The main purpose of a programming language is to enable creation of a software that can be used to do repetitive tasks efficiently and fast. In this equation, the time spent by a programmer is colossally higher than the time taken by the final program to execute. THEREFORE, IT is both justifiable and IMPARATIVE, that in order to ease the task of programmer, you (u.e. the creator of language) give him a reasonable number of functions without cluttering him with nearly identical functions that he has to constantly look at a manual to find.
A non sequitur. At issue is not the language, but wxEuphoria - a set of wrappers for a library written in a different language.
There is no need to carry my suggestion to an extreme to prove me wrong.
Quite simply 1600 functions in the wxEuphoria are, in my opinion, far in excess of what they should and could be and would prevent people from using it.
Each of these functions represents one function in wxWidgets.
The implication is that the functions in wxWidgets are far in excess of what they should and could be and would prevent people from using it.
Or perhaps you meant to say that having all these functions in a single namespace is the problem, whereas breaking it up as wxWidgets does by class would solve the problem. If this is the case, then I think we have universal agreement that the best thing to do is to break wxEuphoria into namespaces.
Since that's such a big effort, I'm sure the wxEuphoria developers would be happ to accept patches for this.
Real life activities are full of such condensations. Human brain can catalog it better than remembering different names.
Is this really condensing anything? You'd have to remember the name of the function as well as the name of the parameter.
You'd end up with just as many constants (1600 of them at least), unless we're reusing the same constant names for different functions.
Like
display ( TIME, ... ) -- display the current time get ( TIME, ...) -- get the current time
For my own needs, I am already using condensed versions as illustrated by me above and teaching those rather than the 6-8 variations of the same, and students are taking to Windows programming nicely.
I'm tempted to say that the Windows API is a good example of a real life API that is not condensed yet widely used. Then again, that API is not really a good example of how to do anything. Horrible naming standard. (What's with all those Ex functions?)
Where are you teaching, btw? I'm curious to see what classrooms are using Euphoria.
