Missing features in Euphoria

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jimcbrown said...

From my point of view, Euphoria is more-or-less missing only two features - native multithread support and generators. (I'm still working on the first but not making a lot of progress yet.) Otherwise, it mostly has everything you'd expect from another language.

I was quite surprised to read your statement, Jim. Do you really mean that in your opinion the future development of the language should be limited to these two features?

Reading the old posts on the forum I have come across many comments pointing out how Euphoria is actually lacking in many areas, not just the two that you mentioned. Of course, the development team is small and the progress is slow, but why restrict the possibilities for development? Also, I believe it is always better to be realistic, and keep in view the weaknesses of the language, for the sake of improvement.

I have compiled (from many forum posts) a tentative list of the many missing features requested by Euphoria's users over the years, which (I hope) summarizes the main points on which the developers may want to concentrate for future development.

Disclaimer: some of these issues might already have been solved in the latest releases of the language, with which I am not very familiar. If an issue has already been solved, kindly point it out.

  • Lack of structures
  • Lack of OOP
  • Lack of error/exception handling
  • Lack of closures
  • Lack of threads
  • Lack of higher-order functions
  • Lack of support for embedding
  • Lack of native Unicode support
  • Lack of generators
  • Lack of efficient disk space management (to avoid waste of disk space when writing data files)
  • Lack of true random access for files
  • Lack of reference semantics
  • Lack of scalar accumulation along a vector operator
  • Lack of run-time function specifier
  • Lack of pointers
  • Lack of nested functions
  • Lack of REPL
  • Lack of eval ()
  • Lack of reflection
  • Lack of run-time dynamism, i.e. not being able to interpret or evaluate code at run-time

Now, before someone starts shouting at me that Euphoria is not meant to become another C plus plus or the like, trying to incorporate all the possible language features in the world, I clarify that I am NOT advocating that all these features should be implemented in Euphoria. I am merely pointing out that these features (some of which may indeed be useless or redundant) are not present in Euphoria. At the same time, I am sure that many users would really appreciate if some of these features were added to the language.

Could some of the developers please take the time to comment on the features listed above, just to give the users an idea of what they should or should not expect in future releases? It would be nice if a priority marker was specified against each feature (e.g. high, medium, low, nil) so that the expectations of the users can at least be redefined in more realistic terms.

It would also be useful if non-developers also commented on the desirability of these features, from their respective points of view.

Thanks

Green Euphorian

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