Why Euphoria's great and why we need a Mac port.
My friend and I were talking earlier and it struck me how much Euphoria rocks
and that we need an official Mac OS X port.
At work he came up with a very nice idea for an application designed to teach
languages. After discussing this for a while and agreeing that yes, this could be
a very cool (and profitable) product we decided to see if we could actually go
about making it. Me, being the nuts-and-bolts guy I am, brought up the issue of
what language(s) should we use for this. We'll need something that can do text
processing, lexical analysis, graphics, and (this is the most important thing)
work on a Mac. He suggested we use C (or one of it's offshoots) potentially with
SDL for graphics and an embeded scripting language because C usually isn't the
top choice for text processing and language analysis. We looked at the
"mainstream" languages commonly used as an embeded scripting language (Python,
Perl, Ruby, TCL, LISP, and Lua) and this was our consensus:
Perl - Excellent text processing language but doesn't scale well in big
projects.
TCL - Much better when using in a large project but doesn't have the same power
as Perl that we need.
Python - Pretty much the same as TCL.
Ruby - Good for representing abstract data but lacked the power/efficiency of
Perl.
Lua - Easy to read and write large portions of it but wasn't powerful enough.
LISP - Excellent and both extracting and representing abstract lexical data and
scales up and down very well. The only problem is that the syntax isn't
everyone's cup of tea and can be quirky.
While we were discussing these languages I kept thinking to myself "Heck, if
Euphoria was available for the Mac we probably wouldn't even need to embed a
language, we could just use Euphoria entirely" since Euphoria's fast enough that
the overhead is negligible in most cases. In fact so far all the algorithms we've
discussed I've initially described in Euphoria since it gives LISP's power with
BASIC-y syntax.
Pleeeease, please Rob port Euphoria to the Mac. I don't want to go back to Perl!
It would open up a whole new arena of coders and make Euphoria more of a
"legitimate" product. I would buy the source and port it myself but, sadly, I'm a
poor college student without a Mac. However, if money/hardware is an issue I
would be willing to donate some money for the developement of a Mac version. I
doubt it would be that hard since Mac OS X uses liberal amounts of FreeBSD code.
Oh yeah, in case anyone's wondering what we're using for the time being, we're
using (I think) Objective-C to interface with graphics and such and Guile (the
GNU projects version of Scheme for embeding stuff) for our hardcore data
mangling.
I miss Euphoria already. :(
|
Not Categorized, Please Help
|
|
