OpenEuphoria

Re: new Eu version, no built-in socks yet

• Posted by Irv Mullins <irv at ELLIJAY.COM> Nov 28, 1999
• 471 views

> Everett Williams wrote:
>
> > 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.

Many of your comments are well taken.. This one, however, I cannot understand.
Can you give an example (code, plz) of where it is necessary to "invoke thte
low-order 8 bits", etc. when manipulating strings in any useful way?

Or which useful string functions from other languages are missing from Euphoria?

Regards,
Irv