OpenEuphoria

Re: Include dir as built-in function

• Posted by Marco Achury <achury at can?v.?et> Apr 29, 2008
• 635 views

I understand that is important to keep the interpreter small.

But I don't understand why there are a lot of function at include as:

global function dir(sequence name)
-- returns directory information, given the name
-- of a file or directory. Format returned is:
-- {
--  {"name1", attributes, size, year, month, day, hour, minute, second},
--  {"name2", ...                                                     },
-- }
    return machine_func(M_DIR, name)
end function

The function is really just one line of code.  M_DIR is a constant 
with value 22.

The include files are plenty of this kind of functions.
¿How big is the effect on interpreter speed/size if some 
of this functions become internals.

Another example is function wait_key(), this is strongly used on 
text mode apps, like ED.EX.

global function wait_key()
-- Get the next key pressed by the user.
-- Wait until a key is pressed.
    return machine_func(M_WAIT_KEY, 0)
end function
M_WAIT_KEY is a constant = 26

What gives better performance?  As built-in 
or as include?

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Marco A. Achury
Caracas, Venezuela