OpenEuphoria

Suggestions for improvement in Euphoria

• Posted by Gambit <gambit at BENDNET.COM> Nov 24, 1998
• 502 views

Here are a few suggestions for better methods of accessing sequences in
Euphoria.

  The first (and simplest) lacking in sequence slicing is the inability to
  do:
    new = old[length(old)..1]
  to get a reverse element-ordering. I have needed this a lot and I'm sure
  I'm not the only one.

  Second, I think there needs to be a better way of accessing the last
  element within a sequence. Perhaps a value of -1 could be used to
  represent the last element, or a character such as '~' to represent the
  length of the sequence. Example:
    new = old[1..length(old)]
  could be the same as:
    new = old[1..-1]
      -or-
    pointer = -1
    new = old[1..pointer]
      -or-
    new = old[1..~]
  the first and last of the new methods would severely reduce the typing
  required on most slicing operations, and in some cases the second example
  would allow more universal code:
    if var1 = var2 then
      element = 2
    else
      element = -1
    end if
    var3 = sequence[element]

  Third, there needs to be better support for multi-depth slicing:
    new = old[1][5][2][3]
  should be replaced with:
    new = old[{1, 5, 2, 3}]
      -or-
    pointer = {1, 5, 2, 3}
    new = old[pointer]
  as this would allow you to use a sequence to let you access different
  depths during run-time without having to use recursive function.

  Fourth, there needs to be support for grabbing many high-level elements
  at once:
    new = repeat(3, 0)
    new[1] = old[2][3][4][1]
    new[2] = old[3][3][4][1]
    new[3] = old[4][3][4][1]
  should be replaced with:
    new = old[2..4][3][4][1]
  and of course the above method of using a sequence to specify depths
  could be applied to get:
    pointer = {3, 4, 1}
    new = old[2..4][pointer]

These are some of the things I most want changed in Euphoria. I'm curious to see
who else agrees, or if RDS is already implementing features similar to these in
the upcoming Euphoria 2.1.