OpenEuphoria

Re: if statement not working

• Posted by David Cuny <dcuny at LANSET.COM> Mar 21, 2002
• 522 views

Euphoria isn't C, or Pascal, or any other language. That's a good thing. But 
it doesn't exist in a vaccum, either. And newbies (and myself) seem to be 
tripped up by two features in Euphoria.

1. The '=' sign. I've argued against the current implementation until I was 
blue in my face. I think the current behavior is more likely to result in 
buggy code. In what other language does an '==' cause the program to come to 
a hard stop?

The only good thing about this is that it prepares you for C coding, by using 
compare() every time you deal with a string. After a while, it becomes second 
nature.

But Robert sees this as a feature, and it's not going to change. 


2. Using slices on strings. This "gotcha" was a handmine that littered a lot 
of my early code. This initially looks like a good idea, until you get a 
string shorter than you expected. So you write:

   if s[1..3] = "/* "

and the code goes into cardiac arrest if the length of s is less than 3. If 
nothing else, Euphoria should offer a substring function that would provide 
some safety:

   if substr( s, 1, 3 ) = "/* "

Of course, it would have to pad the string that's returned with nulls so the 
length would match what was expected, or else *boom*.

Adding short-circuiting helps, but still, I think it's a nasty trap that 
could easily turn someone away from using Euphoria.

-- David Cuny