OpenEuphoria

Re: Open source Euphoria...

• Posted by DB James <larches at comca?t.?et> Jul 18, 2007
• 725 views

Jules wrote:
> 
> DB James wrote:
> > 
> > CChris wrote:
> > > 
> > > Jules wrote:
> > <SNIP>
> > 
> > If changes in Eu code were done based on empirical evidence...
> 
> Not sure what you mean by "empirical evidence"

Derek or CChris or others could answer this better, but an example (kindly
ignore errors) might be:

Ima Coder loves the "enum" keyword from C and she wants to have a keyword in
Eu called constantenum that works this way:

constantenum Name=1,Adr1,Adr2,Adr3,Phone,Last --imagine this 50 items long
sequence database,record
record={}
for i=1 to Last do record=append(record,{}) end for
database=repeat(record,1000)
database[1][Name]="Elvis Presley"
database[1][Adr1]="123 Blue Suede Lane"
...

Okay, so she implements this in a library such that when the code is
processed, it turns the following:

--constantenum Name=1,Adr1,Adr2,Adr3,Phone,Extra

to:

constant Name=1,Adr1=2,Adr2=3,Adr3=4,Phone=5,Extra=6

People try it and report variously: "great!", "dumb", ,"unnecessary",etc.

So, she gets serious, produces some code and puts it in a test version
of Euphoria.  She demonstrates that her code would save time in program
development, etc.  But some find it slows down the interpreter.  She re-codes
and now demonstrates that it is fast.  But some might show that it would
be better to simply borrow "enum" as used in C because (they may prove) it
would be more flexible.  And on like that until there is a general consensus
to accept the code, change it, or forget it.  (Or if the serious coders made
the decision in actual practice, fine.) 

--Quark