OpenEuphoria

Re: Source changes

• Posted by Juergen Luethje <j.lue at ?mx.de> Jul 02, 2007
• 628 views

Robert Craig wrote:

> Juergen Luethje wrote:

>> CChris wrote:
>> 
>>> A few hours ago, I checked in the changes related to value() and get(), so
>>> that
>>> they both return 4 element sequences. I didn't test the generated docs.
>> 
>> <snip>
>> 
>> Rob,
>> 
>> please do not put these changes into the next Euphoria release.
> 
> I can understand your concerns about keeping things
> simple, but I'm not going to veto this change. I doubt that
> it will cause much, if any, code to break.

Backwards compatibility is not my main concern. However, for the sake of
completeness: The proposed change will cause code to break such as

if equal(value(s), {GET_SUCCESS,a}) then

> Christian should listen
> carefully to the arguments of others on this forum, but if he 
> still thinks it's a good idea, then it's OK with me if he proceeds.
> People who take the time to learn SVN, and who do the actual 
> programming work, should be given the benefit of the doubt
> on small changes like this.

Sorry, I disagree.
While knowledge of C and SVN is necessary to make changes to the
language, this does not mean that everyone who meets these requirements
will make sensible changes. Sometimes (often?) less is more, and
sometimes (often?) it is better _not_ do do particular things.

Maybe there should be a democratic vote about proposed changes? While
this cannot be perfect, it probably would be much better than allowing 
everyone with knowledge of C and SVN to change the language.

> Besides, in the future, if there are 
> any bugs in get() or value(), we'll have someone to turn to, 
> other than me.  

I can understand, that you appreciate it when Euphoria is more and more
taken over by the community. And of course this is a "natural" process
after something has been made open source.

However, in the past another advantage of Euphoria has been its
reliability. Every change introduces the risk of new bugs. So changes
that have almost no benefit better shouldn't be made.
As far as I can see, _currently_ get() and value() are not buggy ...

So maybe you can firstly release a bugfix release of Eu 3.1, without
any other changes? This would be important in order to provide a stable
version which we can use for building reliable programs. I would
appreciate it _very_ much.

Regards,
   Juergen