OpenEuphoria

Re: Rob re: Slicing

• Posted by irv <irv at ELLIJAY.COM> Sep 01, 2000
• 777 views

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, you wrote:
> Irv Mullins writes:
> > Question for Rob is this: do you forsee a way
> > that Euphoria could implement such slicing internally,
> > and if so, would you expect it to be significantly
> > faster than a loop such as above?
>
> I could take *any* Euphoria code and implement it
> internally as either a built-in routine or a language feature
> (column selection) and it would run faster. There is nothing
> about column selection that I can do internally in a dramatically
> faster way, i.e. by taking advantage of the internal representation
> of sequences. The routine you wrote is quite reasonable,
> and should be fairly efficient. My philosophy in these matters is
> that Euphoria should be lean and fast, so that people aren't
> afraid to code frequently-called utilities in Euphoria.
> If Euphoria were 40-60 times slower, such as Python or Perl,
> then I would understand people wanting to jam lots of stuff into
> the interpreter where it can be handled by C code.

Then I am forced to ask: why do you brag that "sequences make
Euphoria very simple and very powerful"?

What's the point of including math operations on sequences:
e.g: {1,2,3} + 5, when any programmer could easily write a loop to do this?
Why is this seldom-used feature a part of the language, when similar
features that have _obvious_ and frequent utility are steadfastly
dismissed as "easily user-written", such as sum(), min(), max()....?

Again, to quote from the manual: "Making a flexible list that contains
a variety of different kinds of data objects is trivial in Euphoria, but
requires dozens of lines of ugly code in other languages."
True. Making the list is trivial.
When we try to USE the list,  THAT's when that we get to write the
"dozens of lines of ugly code."

Let's take an example of this directly from the manual:

include sort.e
sequence database
database = {{"Smith", 95.0, 29},
                  {"Jones", 77.2, 31},
                 {"Clinton", 88.7, 44}}

 database = sort(database)  --sort works fine on mixed sequences

for i = 1 to length(database) do -- added to verify sort
  printf(1,"Name: %s\n",{database[i][1]})
end for

? find("Jones",database) -- ain't there, is it?
? match("Jones",database) -- nope, can't find Jones anywhere.

The manual even adds, right at the bottom of the page:
"See Also: compare, match, find", implying that find and/or
match would work on sequences as easily as sort. They don't.
At least, not without writing those dozens of lines of ugly code.

These are the kinds of inconsistencies that I at first overlooked
because of the newness of the language, assuming they would
be fixed in due time. At this point, however, I have my doubts.

Regards,
Irv