OpenEuphoria

Issues installing Euphoria

• Posted by dcuny Nov 29, 2014
• 2650 views

Every now and then, I get the urge to try out Euphoria again. And then I try installing it, and my experience is terrible.

This isn't a commentary on Euphoria itself, but on the experience of trying to get Euphoria up and running on my machine (Windows 7, 64 bit).

First, I figured I'd first download the latest (4.1.0) version of Euphoria. That turns out to be a .zip file, with no installer. That's OK, I'll just get the prior version.

Hurrah... It installs fine, although 42 meg seems larger than I remember it. Oh, well. It wants a reboot, and I'm ready to try things out.

I test it out by clicking some demos. They're showing their age, with buzz program using long-abandoned phrases like pen computing, fax modem and RISC.

Time to try out an editor. Maybe ed is better than I remember.

file? prompts ed, which is not a good sign at all. I type in test.ex and press Enter, where I'm presented with a text-based editor that's at least 30 years past it's prime.

Hrm... No syntax coloring. I must have put in the wrong file extension. Thinking I can rename the file, I press ESC and see:

help clone quit save write new eui dos find replace lines mods ddd CR:

I really hate ed. What does ddd stand for, anyway? So I press h and get:

Seriously? I just installed the program. I have to set EUDIR manually? Fine, I'll check the documentation. But first, I try to Save the program, and...

Ooops, ed closes. Because ed is really, really horrible (sorry, Robert). I start to wonder why, if Euphoria were really that easy to code in, why hasn't someone hasn't made the default editor that Euphoria comes with much better than it currently is.

Ah, well... Time to check out how to set EUDIR. I bring up the documentation (nicely formatted, but a bit of a pain to navigate) and find:

No, not that one...

OK, so the documentation hasn't been updated in a while. Now, I understand why it's not up-to-date. But that's OK, the instructions should work with Windows 7, right?

Nope.

Nope.

Wow. Just freaking wow. At this point, I'm beyond ready to quit. But Googling finds a solution that doesn't suggest using the Control Panel at all. Instead, it suggests looking in Computer, Properties, Advances System Settings, the Advanced tab, and finally Environment Variables. (There's also a solution for Windows 8).

Now, if the Euphoria installer had set EUDIR in the first place, this could have been avoided. And since EuIDE knows how to set the WATCOM environment, this seems an odd omission. (That's a part of the story I've edited out).

All right, so now I can run my program in ed. There's a bug in the code, but it's pretty obvious. I fix it to:

print(1, "hello") 

and get:

All right, I know what the problem is:

printf(1, "hello") 

Success! So I Save it... ^#&%#@&%$^#%! Only in ed does Save mean Save and Close. Enough of this... I can't use Euphoria unless there's a decent editor, and ed isn't it. So I check out the list of editors for Euphoria - there are 27 listed, so it shouldn't be hard to find one, right?

Edita looks interesting, but the comments on the Euphoria site say it's deprecated.

EuIDE is slick, but... apparently needs to be used with Win32Lib. That's too bad, because it looks like it would be an awesome little editor. I try it for a bit, and then move on.

Scintilla for Euphoria looks promising, but I can't figure out how to make it work - the Scintilla binary isn't even included. After a while, I give up and move on.

The Notepad++ option looks promising (and simple), so I have a go at that. But the instructions are for an older version of NPP, and it fails to import the XML. So, no dice.

vim is a complete non-starter - I've never liked vi.

Crimson Editor and its replacement Emerald Editor are both abandoned projects.

Geany looks promising... The installation instructions aren't completely clear, but I have a go at it. The directions say I need to read the source code for the installation - never a good sign. Seriously?

The install program says:

--  Windows XP (and later) users should run Geany at least once 
--  before executing this program so that the "APPDATA" environment 
--  variable can be properly set. Users of other versions of 
--  Windows may have to set the path to the Geany configuration 
--  directory, manually. 

I've got no clue what the "path to the Geany configuration directory" is, since I've never used Geany before. I give it a try, and run the install program, which gives me:

See the bug? Yep, ' C:\Euphoria' has a leading space in it. Which is interesting, because EuIDE worked fine with the EUDIR being set wrong. I've been spending an awful lot of time at the command line to use Euphoria, which also isn't a good sign. I could "just click" the file - as long as I didn't mind not being able to see any error messages. (And no, install doesn't write to err.out, because there is no runtime error).

And then I notice that it's also trying to compile to C code, which means I need to have a C compiler installed and set up for this to work! I make the change from euc to bind. Ooops, make that eubind.

Hurrah... It works... Sort of. But there's still something misconfigured, because the error isn't showing up in Geany.

It's taken me over 4 hours to get to this point, and I haven't even got an editor working right yet.

Anyway, this isn't meant to complain about Euphoria as a language or denigrate the hard work done by the developers, but to give some idea what the user experience of trying to install and use Euphoria is like. I think any "Euphoria is dying" discussion that doesn't take the pain of installation into account is missing the boat.

- David