OpenEuphoria

Re: Eu improvements (part 4)

• Posted by Chris Bensler <bensler at nt.net> Jan 06, 2007
• 647 views

James W Hofmann wrote:
> 
> > The proposal is SS.
> > The proposal is NOT dot-notation, NOT named elements,
> > NOT namespaced ids, NOT a new syntax for user-defined datatypes.
> > It IS a combination of all those things in a coherent package.
> > 
> > For or Against?
> > 
> > KtB
> > 
> 
> I'm a "no." 
> 
> Your presentation of SS does some things that the type keyword doesn't do
> currently, but it loses the precise check-as-function feature. To get both
> implies that you make both a SS and a type; that is inelegant - a pollution
> of keywords. In addition, SS tries very hard to separate itself from the
> original sequence type; there is a lack of clarity in how the code:
> 
> }}}
<eucode>
> sequence point is
>      atom x,y
> end sequence
> </eucode>
{{{

> 
> actually translates to a REAL sequence. (the only thing implied is that
> x comes before y. And then what happens with "extends" is even less clear.)
> Even if you do define the behavior in some consistent manner, a reliance
> on implied order will cause problems for the programmer who wishes to
> mix SS with indexing.
> 
> You are welcome to debate on those points, of course.
> 
> I will also mention pass-by-reference. I think that is a bad idea for a
> different reason; it avoids the real problem, which is an absence of
> references! That is what makes complex data structures in Eu hard, more so
> than any issue with naming. We instead resort to global variables and code
> to maintain counts and other ugly things. References should be done
> everywhere, as a new data type, if they're going to be done at all.
> 
> (I would even declare the result a "new language"
> if it were necessary to do references properly.)

Wise conclusions. I agree fully.

Chris Bensler
~ The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra ~
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