OpenEuphoria

Re: Fair Criticism

• Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com> Aug 10, 2001
• 504 views

----- Original Message -----
From: "Irv Mullins" <irvm at ellijay.com>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: Fair Criticism


>
> I rarely see mention of Euphoria in any newsgroups, and when I do,
> more often than not it is negative. Below is one. While you
> might argue with points one and two, point 3 is right on the money.
>
> -- quote:
>
>   1) I'd never even heard of it before, and I'm a language slut.  This
> suggests to me that the user community is very small, and when the
> author gets tired of it the language will die.

I worry about this a bit too. Robert seems afraid to have it (too) popular.
It seems that RDS wants to remain a small-time outfit.

>   2) It's commercial and proprietary (it's cheap, but it still costs),
> which IMO are acceptable for applications but extraordinarily bad ideas
> for basic infrastructure like a programming language.

This doesn't make a lot of sense. Most successful development environments
are expensive for the "full" version but offer cheap or free cut-down
versions. Also, the language specification is freely available so what's
stopping anybody from creating new compilers and interpreters.

>   3) It's not object-oriented, and doesn't even have structs.  This is
> the real show-stopper.  Without this capability, it's going to be a
> nightmare to write code using complex data structures.  The example in
> the manual of using sequences as structs is just evil incarnate:
> ]A Structure:
> ]        employee = {
> ]                    {"John","Smith"},
> ]                    45000,
> ]                    27,
> ]                    185.5
> ]                   }
> ]To access "fields" or elements within a structure it is good
> ] programming style to make up a set of constants that name the various
> ] fields. This will make your program easier to read. For the example
> ] above you might have:
> ]        constant NAME = 1
> ]        constant FIRST_NAME = 1, LAST_NAME = 2
> ]        constant SALARY = 2
> ]        constant AGE = 3
> ]        constant WEIGHT = 4
> ]You could then access the person's name with employee[NAME], or if you
> ] wanted the last name you could say employee[NAME][LAST_NAME].
>
>   The mind recoils in horror!
> -- end quote
>
> Anyone who has written a substantial program in Euphoria surely will have
to
> agree that
> this arrangement is complex, error-prone, and belies any claim of
> "simplicity" that might
> be made about the language.

I agree with you Irv. The current workaround, using sequences to emulate
structures, is just that - a workaround and not a resolution of this issue.

> Is this going to be fixed in 2.3?

Don't hold your breath. I suspect that RDS can only cope with one major
language enhancement per release. May we should start the campaign for
structures for 2.4.

-----
Derek