OpenEuphoria

Re: Easy???????????????????????

• Posted by Mike Burrell <Mike.Burrell at GEOCITIES.COM> May 26, 1997
• 859 views

> Hi
> I have just spent 3 months trying to learn Euphoria everybody says that it
> is easy where do they get that from? I still can not get anything done in
> it.I know basic,but Euphoria is hard not easy.

as with the others, i encourage you to post all your difficulties
specifically in here...  but first there are a few things about
euphoria that make it a little quirkish at first when switching from
basic:

- strings are not "magical" little variables with operate differently
than all other variables for some unknown reason...  a string is
simply an array of numbers...  i.e. "hello" is EXACTLY the same thing
as {104,101,108,108,111} (look it up in your ascii table)

- nothing needs to be dimensioned before hand...  one of the most
annoying things with other languages is that arrays and numeral
variables alike had to be told how big they could be...  seeing that
euphoria operates entirely using dynamic data structures, variables
grow and shrink upon demand

- include files...  throughout my qbasic career i'd never actually
bothered to use a library or anything of the sort...  include files
and libraries make sure that memory isn't wasted by allowing for
procedures and functions which will never be used...  many of the
procedures and functions mentioned in the help files require that you
include libraries

- elite functions...  i'm not sure about qbasic in this respect, i
haven't used it in a while, but in euphoria one can return an array
of any type of variable...not just a single value

- dynamic data structures...  i touched briefly on this before, but
this allowed for data structures to grow, shrink or morph into nearly
any type of structure (especially with the elimination of the 64k
barrier :> )...  when using arrays in qbasic, it was very well
defined that each element of the array would be a single value, and
it was also well defined that the size of the array could not
change...  in euphoria, however, this isn't the case...  for example,
element 1 of a sequence (or array) could be a number where as element
2 of the same sequence could be another sequence, creating
sub-sequences and so-forth -- whatever you want it to be...  i think
the euphoria reference manual covers this pretty well, but i could be
wrong :>

those are the most difficult aspects of euphoria i think, especially
the last one...




    .   o   O   Mike Burrell   O   o   .
. o O http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9036 O o .
   .  o  O burrellm at geocities.com O  o  .