OpenEuphoria

Garbage and macros

• Posted by Daniel Johnson <Lmailles at AOL.COM> Feb 13, 1998
• 730 views

I heard mention of garbage collection recently. Does Euphoria have a fully
automatic garbage collection system like Java ? If I read a whole file into a
sequence, should I null the sequence after I have finished ?

I had an idea yesterday, which may not be original, or may even be old stock.
If it is, use whatever form of DELETE button you have available.

In some assemblers you have the option of macros. These are like subroutines
except that they are inserted into the code at compile-time ie they run
inline. This of course saves the time of a subroutine call, and also saves
repeating code. This could be extremely handy in Euphoria, for example if you
use the same short piece of code several times in a prog, and call it a large
number of times eg

macro stuff(integer a)
    return power(a+1,2)-3
end macro

sequence temp
temp={}

for a=1 to 1000000
    temp=temp&stuff(a)
end for

The other *real* advantage of macros is that they could allow conditional
compilation.

if condition then
    macro stuff(integer a)
        return power(a+1,2)-3
    end macro
else
    macro stuff(integer a)
        return a       --This compiles to nothing
    end macro
end if

Then when you run your for-loop, you have saved 1000000 wasted function calls.

Just an idea.

Daniel Johnson
Les Mailles Telesoft