Eu Rebellion (was: New Euphoria Users Website)
- Posted by Matthew Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at YAHOO.COM> Nov 15, 2002
- 493 views
> From: jbrown105 at speedymail.org [mailto:jbrown105 at speedymail.org] > On 0, Chris Bensler <bensler at mail.com> wrote: <snip> > > I personally, would rather not see any ranting, but instead > see people > > committing to acheive the goals themselves. Obviously this > is up to the > > indiviudal to decide. <snip> > Other than Bach and assorted modified interpreters, I don't really see > the > elements of your "rebellion" of Eu either. > > Then again, I'd doubt such rebellion would do much to Rob. As an author of an assorted modified interpreter, I'll say that there hasn't exactly been a lot of excitement over the new features that have been made in the new interpreters. Karl's has certainly gotten the most press and 10.50 in micro-bucks (IIRC, Igor is the only other person to release a modified interpreter). Of course, he's also put out the most features, and included probably the number one request: structures. Don't get me wrong, I didn't think that I'd created a better mouse trap, and that everyone would instantly beat a path to my door. However, there were at least two people (Kat, and someone else whom I can't recall, but who said he would donate 6 months worth of mico-economy money to anyone who could solve it) who had asked for one feature--flexible variable referencing/creation--and a whole host of others who have asked for the second--specifying a crash routine. To date, not only haven't I received any micro-bucks (didn't really expect any), but I haven't gotten any user feedback, either. <shameless plug> One nice thing about the variable stuff is that you can use it just for debugging--get a dump of all variables to an eds database upon a crash basically by including one file and using my interpreter--easy to take out and use the real deal for distribution. So you can get some real benefit, but not be locked into a non-standard interpreter. </shameless plug> I don't really feel shorted by this, since I had a lot of fun doing it, and learned a lot as well. However, it sends a message that perhaps these things aren't that important. And guess what, that message is heard by not only myself, but by Rob, too. I sometimes forget to vote my money, but usually get all 3.00 up there, often for somewhat obscure things that aren't the most useful pieces of code, but at least hit my areas of interest, or that I think are useful things to be doing (I think I've voted for most of the reformatted help files). Someone recently postulated that the structure of the interpreter [being optimized for speed rather than maintainability] was a reason for lack of speedy changes. I disagree. I've had difficulty in modifying the source, but I attribute that to my lack of C skills and the simple fact that I'm wading into someone else's code (which gets multiplied by my C ineptitude). Karl would like to sell Bach, so I wouldn't really expect him to share source code with Rob, so it may not be so realistic to see structures, etc put into Eu2.4--not that Rob couldn't implement them himself. I have no such illusions about my output, however, I'd be happy to hand the code over to Rob (or anyone else who's interested and owns the source). The only reason I didn't release it was the license. I know I've offered it to anyone willing to compile it on linux. Perhaps a separate message board/mailing list for the source code. I suppose Rob would have to maintain it in order to keep it secure and not violate the license, but that might really spur development. Maybe just a message board on the RDS web site with password access, where we could exchange messages and post code? IMO, this is a very valid reason for splitting from the main list, and might be very useful--to us and to Rob. Matt Lewis PS Structures are the only part of Bach that really interest me.