Re: new Eu version, no built-in socks yet
Mr. Williams,
Your views on Euphoria, and programming in general are well thought and
insightful.
To the casual observer, however, it would seem that you spend more time
discussing
the virtues of other programming languages than talking about Euphoria itself.
Perhaps, instead of talking about what Euphoria should have built into it, you
should
sit down and write some libraries and routines that do such things?
Of course, some things, such as Java-like bytecodes, the sandbox, etc. have to
be
built in to the interpreter itself. In which case, why not dust off the old C
compiler and write your own language?
Suggesting changes is one thing.
Suggesting them time and time again becomes preaching.
Respectfully,
Greg Phillips.
Everett Williams wrote:
> 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
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