OpenEuphoria

Re: Digest for EUforum at topica.com, issue 6333

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Jan 09, 2007
• 591 views

Chris Bensler wrote:
> The point is that the problem of side-effects is now much worse,

I wouldn't say it's worse, just different. 
And at least now it's better documented. Other languages, 
such as C/C++ leave the order of operations in this case 
deliberately undefined, and in fact there are incompatible 
differences between C/C++ compilers.

> for the sake of a very small improvement in speed.

I didn't do the $ feature to gain speed, although it
does in some cases. I did it because I got tired of
writing out stuff like:

   rob_craig[1..length(rob_craig)-1]

or

   rob_craig[chris_bensler][1..length(rob_craig[chris_bensler])-1]

instead of simply:

   rob_craig[1..$-1]

or:

   rob_craig[chris_bensler][1..$-1]

I wasn't happy when I realized that some existing (weird) code 
would break, and I could have avoided the breakage by making the 
implementation of $ very inefficient in some cases. So inefficient,
that I would never have implemented $ that way. Many people
wanted something like $, so I decided to do a proper, efficient
implementation of it (requiring a huge change to the subscripting code), 
while letting some old, weird, code break.

I personally found one place in Language War that depended 
on the old behavior. It surprised me to realize that the
code relied on this behavior, because it was not deliberate
on my part. It was really just luck that it worked.
Having to split one statement into two was easy, and
made the logic much easier for anyone else to understand.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com