OpenEuphoria

Re: Ideas for next Eu

• Posted by David Cuny <dcuny at LANSET.COM> Nov 07, 1999
• 829 views

Martin wrote:

> Many of us have commented on what a pleasure
> Euphoria is to use. For me, it lets me do whatever
> I want with very little "expense".

I agree - it's generally pleasant writing code in Euphoria, and this isn't
something to be dismissed lightly.

I personally dislike it when the compiler forces me to do things that are
'good for me', when I know that it could certainly do things automatically.
Variable declaration is one of them, but I've gotten used to it by now.

Variable initialization, on the other hand, is one that still baffles me.
Euphoria forces you to declare your variables, but you have to assign them
on a different (logical) line of code. You can't just write:

    integer foo = 0

but instead have to write:

    integer foo
    foo = 0

It seems to me that if you are going to force the user to declare variables,
and make the program abort if they are not initialized, you should let them
intialize the variables where they are being declared.

Shutting down the application without an error recovery routine is something
else I take issue to. The EE editor still (very rarely) will abort on an
error, and I'll lose data. If there was a vectored onError routine that
could execute before program shutdown, I'd at least be able to try to save a
backup file.

Robert seems adamant about keeping forward references difficult in Euphoria,
because he considers this to be bad coding style. This seems to me another
attempt to force the user into 'good coding style'. Sometimes there are
compelling reasons to use forward references, and I don't know that making
the user feel irritated that they have to jump through hoops is a good
thing.

Since I'm on a roll, I'm mention the scope constraints of routine_id and the
fact that the value starts at zero... did I miss anything?

OK, moving on to the future of Euphoria. I think that the namespace is
important. The ability to scale programs well is important, and it seems
that Java's thought the problem through fairly well. Someone floated the
idea of using Euphoria in HTML, similar to JavaScript - an intriguing idea.

-- David Cuny