Re: new Eu version, no built-in socks yet
Kat wrote:
>I don't allow ActiveX to run on my puters, and every day i see Java that
>doesn't run right.
>
>Kat
I'm no fan of Java as a language, but the bytecodes and the sandbox are
worthy paradigms that should be the way the world heads. JavaBeans and
Enterprise JavaBeans along with JINI which is java-centric are the only
anodyne to what MS is pitching to the WWW and they appear to be much
more stable than straight Java code. Our worthy language author keeps
touting the speed of Euphoria against VB, Perl, Python, and Rebol. That
comparison will hold a lot more water when the functionality of Euphoria
approaches that of those languages. Granted, once one gets to Socks or
IPv8, one has to factor out the world wide wait when doing comparisons,
but that is not an impossible task. Also, three of those cost less than
the registered version of Euphoria. That is not a dig against Euphoria. That
is a note that says that one cannot compare apples with oranges. Euphoria
can play with those guys and beat them either with internal functionality
or easy access to external functionality. My vote would be for a little of
both. Direct, internal, portable Internet access would give the language a
huge boost. Most other functionality can be had with portable libraries or
masking routines shipped with product or easily available from other sources.
The one other item that I see holding that particular scenario back is the
lack of a powerful string handling facility either internally or as an embedded
set of functions. I repeat what I have said before. String data is not numeric
data except at the grossest level. It is metadata with a grammar of it's
own. The fact that I can add 256 to a[1] when a = "BCD" where B, C, and
D are of a set whose values are limited to 0-255 in the input and output
streams indicates a profound conflict between the Euphoria sequence and
my understanding of text string data. Their contiguity between the quotes
implies the contiguity of their logical boundaries. That contiguity is not
found.
Text is a bit-stream whose subsets correspond to our view of their
representation. The rules for the flow of that bit-stream are entirely external
to Euphoria. I would not recommend that they be internalized...that is a
thing to be accomplished with the algorithmic beauty of Euphoria. All I am
asking for is a recognition within the language of the intrinsic nature of
strings, and some primitives that will speed it's handling. It is a clear subset
of the sequence in it's most general terms, but like so many other things
that are subsets of the sequence, they are not defined nor definable
subsets without huge overhead. Typing will not help here, because of the
overhead, and because it cannot be invoked globally without impeding the
natural flow of the language. Always having to invoke the low-order eight
bits of a word when we are really not supposed to know that it IS a word
is a most frustrating contradiction.
Most structures can be defined, at least logically, as subsets of the
Euphoria sequence, but with no easy translation to external formats and
no paradox free naming conventions, that fact is of little use or comfort.
Everett L.(Rett) Williams
rett at gvtc.com
|
Not Categorized, Please Help
|
|
