RE: GOTO - A fresh perspective?
doc at edgetap.net wrote:
> Hi all,
...
> First, I would
> like to say that my general impression of everyone using this forum is
> that you are all pretty intelligent, thoughtful and considerate, if not
> agreeable, in your replies. However, this makes it all the more
> difficult for me to figure why you seem to be adopting language-centric
> arguments in your debate rather than accepting that if a feature helps
> someone do something easier then it is intrinsically "good" for them, if
>
> not for you personally.
I think your focus on the programmer is basically right. However, I
would argue by example that it is not necessarily the best thing for a
programming language to add features that one or more people like. I
offer perl is an example of a programming language where all of the
developers kept adding features to make it the way they wanted it.
Subroutine calls should be identified by using an ampersand in front of
their names, unless you don't want to, and parameters passed to a
subroutine should be enclosed in parentheses, unless you don't want to.
Scalar variables should have a dollar sign in front of their name, but
if you don't include the dollar sign and perl recognizes the word as a
variable then the dollar sign is optional. This type of do it if you
want or don't if you don't want has been done so much that different
programmers writing code in perl can use such widely divergent sets of
which punctuations they use that they almost look like different
languages. These options have made parsing perl more difficult and can
hardly have speeded up the resulting code. There are so many ways to do
the same things in perl that having used perl for years I still see
features and tricks in perl that I'd never even heard of before. This
makes it very difficult to pick up someone else's code to use or modify
it since they might well have used some feature that I'd never seen
before.
I offer this as an example of what can happen when too many features are
loaded into a language because "someone wanted it." While there are
features I would like to see added to Euphoria so that it would be
easier to interface with DLLs and do other things more easily, I can't
begrudge Robert trying to maintain his own vision for what Euphoria
should be. I just wish he was getting it done a bit faster. 
-JoKeR
(now using a new email address, formerly kriviere at mindspring.com)
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