OpenEuphoria

Re: Homogeneous sequence

• Posted by Jason Gade <jaygade at yah?o?com> Aug 14, 2007
• 666 views

CChris wrote:
> It is NOT a joke. Euphoria's verbosity is already pretty high, and code
> becomes
> rapidly hard to read with all those wordy stuff and long significative
> identifiers.
> Only proper spacing makes it tolerable, but then you bump rapidly into line
> length issues, since the display is not extensible. The idea is to fight
> visual
> clutter, the average level of which is dangerously high.

Obviously we disagree on that as well. I think that Euphoria's verbosity is
"just right". Neither too long nor too short. I find it to be very readable.

> 
> Since we use {...} to denote a sequence of what's between the braces, it is
> pretty intuitive to put a type mark there instead of actual values to mean
> that
> the sequence is made of elements of such a type.
> 
> But perhaps you don't like indicating sequence contents with braces?

Yeah, on the RHS. Not the LHS. I find your example above practically unreadable.

> 
> This is a frequent case, but by no means the only one:
> Is a string made of printable characters only?
> Are all the characters in some Unicode range, else change font?
> Are all records of the list the same length? (Juergen's initial concern)
> Do all records verify some consistency check, like
> s[i][DATE_START]<s[i][DATE_END]
> \forall i?
> 
> And countless many other cases, which would be coded much more neatly than
> they
> now are. Of course, direct type checks are costly, but flagging homogeneous
> sequences would speed up a lot of things by allowing incremental type
> checking,
> as emphasized earlier in the thread.
> 
> CChris

Then write a function or a type to do it! It's not that hard. I think you focus
too much on the performance issues. Are we all still running at 33MHz or what?

Anyway, as I said elsewhere in the thread, I liked Pete's idea of limiting it to
new type definitions. That may also increase the usage of a well-designed but
under-used language feature.

--
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple
system that works.
--John Gall's 15th law of Systemantics.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming."
--C.A.R. Hoare

j.