Re: question about find function
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Feb 14, 2021
- 1559 views
Years ago, i wrote my own routines, that work as i expect them to. I am not here to work for and fit into the language, but vice versa.
I think of programming as a craft and like any other craft, there are general-purpose tools and specific-purpose tools, and it's up to the crafts-person to determine which is best suited for the task at hand. And the best crafts-people will often find they need to build their own tools when they've reached the limits of what others have provided. And whenever we do that, it shows we're growing and improving our craft.
It's strange to see you use the word "strings", it was such a dirty word that began many flame wars on the old forum.
I know, and I remember seeing some of those conversations. I may have even taken to adding to the flames. But I think that we need to de-stigmatize language like "strings" or anything else that may have resulted from the pedantry and gate-keeping of the past. If it looks like a string, swims like a string, and quacks like a string, then it probably is a string. Let's just call it a string, even if the underlying representation of the data is something else.
Perhaps now match() can be aliased to strfind() ? Well, maybe not, that will find only sub-matches, not equivalences. Must be a reason somewhere....
I think I'd avoid any similarly-named "str" functions in Euphoria. I am still constantly confused by the subtle differences of strcmp, strpos, substr, instr, in languages like C and PHP. What's worse is some of those functions have the same name but slightly-different behaviors. In Euphoria, find() finds, match() matches, compare() compares, reverse() reverses. Even if I do find it normal to call them "strings" we need to keep in mind that underneath the strings we are still working with the versatility of sequences. Although, thinking about it now, I suppose adding a specific string library with C/PHP-alike functions might be helpful for porting other code and easing the transition of newcomers to the language.
Github doesn't work for me on windoze.
Can you not install Git, or does it not work when you try to use it? What version of Windows are you on? There's a portable version that doesn't require an actual install: https://git-scm.com/download/win. You should be able to just extract that into a local directory and then add the "bin" directory it to your PATH.
I am not going to install *nix and spend a weekend downloading and debugging *nix packages
And I wouldn't expect you to. Personally, I'm still trying to sort out all of the required packages to complete a full-release build of OpenEuphoria, which is at least part of the reason why it hasn't happened yet. I can build the core executables over and over again but a lot of the other tools and documentation still elude me.
so i can use yet another google product (github).
Git is a source code versioning tool originally developed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. GitHub is a website for hosting Git-based projects owned by Microsoft. (GitHub was an independent company until its acquisition in 2018.) At the time, I was apprehensive but optimistic and so far I think it's been going well. Git is the most-used code versioning tool by a very wide margin and GitHub is the largest host of public Git repositories. And I realize this may sound like an ad populum fallacy, but I believe that to remain relevant to world, we at least have to try to exist in the same venue as the rest of the world.
Making the acquisition of OE more difficult doesn't help.
The last thing I want to do is keep anyone out of anything or make it more difficult to get or do things. Acquiring the code itself doesn't require Git, and I'm sorry if I suggested that was the only way forward. If you click the Code button on the project page, you can select "Download ZIP" to get a complete copy of the repository as-is. It doesn't even come with the .git directory, just the code. If you want to contribute any changes then make them and then email me a zip file of the files and I'll do the necessary diff'ing and git'ing to merge the changes.
Have you noticed how many $millions Julia has raked in in the 10 years it's been in existance?
I'm painfully aware of how popular younger languages like Juila, Go, Rust, and Swift have become in the past ten years. Even languages as old as Euphoria, like Python, Ruby, and Lua have all gained quite a massive following, much much larger than we have here. And I think Euphoria better than all of those. But those languages have all found adoption via large corporations or communities needing a scratch a specific itch and either inventing the language to solve it (Swift: Apple, Rust: Mozilla, Go: Google) or have injected serious money or resources into the language (Python: education/engineering, Ruby: web development, Lua: game development). We need to scratch an itch.
-Greg
