OpenEuphoria

Re: Wierd Language Syntax idea

• Posted by Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen <nieuwen at XS4ALL.NL> Jun 04, 1998
• 616 views

>And by the way, I want to be able to do

>
>{x,y} = foo()

This and you other suggestion can be solved by the programming method the
language ICON uses.
Consider this ICON function (in EUphoria pseudo-code):

function for (integer begin, integer end, integer step) do
    return  begin
    if end > begin then
        begin = begin + step
        return begin
    end if
end function

sequence txt
txt = "This is a message"

puts (1, txt)        -- Will print the first character of txt
all puts (1, txt)      -- Keeps streaming txt until it returns no more value
-- Thus: it prints the whole txt sequence

all for(1,10,1) do puts (1, txt) end do
-- Will display the first 10 characters of txt only once!

Why ? Lets trace it.
First the for () statement will return 1, then the first character is
displayed. the 'ALL' means we don't stop until we no longer have any
arguments to use. So it will print a character of txt 10 times.

A bit more of this strange, but powerfull, behaviour.

    all txt = 'e' do puts(1, "X") else puts(1, "*") end do

Will display: ***********X****X

How can this solve your {x,y} assignment problem. Simple: It doesn't need
any assigns at all. Using this streaming technique, you could put *any*
algoritm in a single statement containing your whole program. How explecit
can one be ?

Just search for ICON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
The language itself, is really shitty, very slow, weird unneeded datatypes,
etc. But this aspect could inspire us.

We really don't like to assign every thing, check its value or stuff like
that. This would solve it.

>and to be able to evaluate
>
>{{1,2},{3,4},{5,6}} * {x,y}

Yes, it would be nice if this worked!
Robert, if sequences don't match, they should go a level deeper until they
do. It would be more powerfull behaviour.
BTW what about being able to say:

sequence s
s = {4,4,5,5,2}

if +s != 20 then
    puts(1, "that's weird when I add 4, 4, 5, 5 and 2 together I *do* have
20")
end if

And like +sequence_name, why not also have -seq_name and *seq_name and
/seq_name

Ralf