OpenEuphoria

Re: String?

• Posted by irv mullins <irvm at ellijay.com> May 31, 2004
• 652 views

Rolf Schröder wrote:

> 3) For I know what I would like to read|write|print, Euphoria gives you the
>    opportunity to decide, what you would like to handle as a 'string' or not.
>    In practice I don't see any necessity to have a so called string type, it
>    makes no real sense. However, if you believe you need it, then use a
>    type function similar like that, what Nicholas Koceja has given as an
>    example.

This is an 'opportunity' not unlike our recently-enjoyed 'opportunity' 
to pay income taxes. It obligates me to do lots of extra work, costing me 
time and money, and I seldom if ever see any benefits.

The way I see it, is if in my program I declare 
"This is a sequence of human-readable characters\n", 
then clearly it was intended to be a sequence of human readable 
characters, and Euphoria should be smart enough to *remember* that for 
at least a few minutes, so later, when I want to display that sequence, 
Euphoria will do so correctly. 

If I had intended it to be {84,104,105,115,32,105,115,32,97,32,115...  
(perhaps a list of ages or weights or something) then I would have 
entered them as {84,104,105,115,32,105,115,32,97,32,115... wouldn't 
I? 

In the rare instance where someone might want to display the 
ASCII equivalents, or do "math" on that sequence, then *that* is where 
the programmer should have to go to extra lengths to coerce the 
data into some other form. Not every single time he uses it.

> Do you really think a sting type makes sense in Euphoria? I don't! 

Absolutely.
When I first started programming, computers were primarily for crunching 
numbers, and text was only a secondary concern. That day is long past.

Irv