Re: "OF" in types, yet again...
I'll have to agree with Robert. In other languages, types are necessary. In
Euphoria, they aren't. Us advanced programmers (
) know what it's all about,
but beginners don't know what's important and what not.
Remember one of the motto's of Euphoria: 'Easier to learn than BASIC'. Adding
extra stuff that's not really necessary makes Euphoria less easy to learn.
What does a beginner really have to learn about types in Euphoria: atoms and
sequences.
Keep It Simple, Sydney.
Robert Craig wrote:
> Thanks, I downloaded the zip and took a quick look at it.
> I have no technical problems with implementing
> something like this. As I said, I studied this in great detail
> a few years ago. It's a logical and elegant extension to
> the language. I would not restrict it to one-level of slice or
> force the new syntax to appear only within a type declaration.
> e.g. I would allow an infinite number of levels:
> sequence of sequence of ... <type> x
>
> Of course people will naturally demand a way to declare structures
> and add them to the type system. e.g. sequence of mystruct x
>
> I don't need a benchmark to show me that type checking one (subscript)
> or a few (slice) elements will be much faster than checking
> the whole sequence.
>
> The only thing holding me back is that I doubt many people
> would use this, and those that would use it would not benefit
> greatly from it. I can't see many people bothering to say:
>
> sequence of sequence of integer s
>
> when they can just say
>
> sequence s
>
> I've found that most people are more interested in how few keystrokes
> they can type to get the job done, than they are with adding
> extra type-checking, especially with all the run-time checking
> that Euphoria already has.
>
> Beginners would have to read a big new section of the manual
> describing all these wonderful types that they can create.
> They would falsely conclude that this was an essential
> part of the language, without which you can't do anything,
> just like C++ or most other statically-typed languages.
>
> In Euphoria, types are for documentation and debugging. Period.
> They are not used to construct data structures, like in most
> other languages. Thus they are not central to the language,
> like they are in most other languages. I wouldn't want to
> add a lot of fancy extensions to something that isn't very important.
--
tommy online: http://users.pandora.be/tommycarlier
Euphoria Message Board: http://uboard.proboards32.com
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