Changes to Euphoria
Jason Gade wrote:
>
>
> It's not like I'm against /every/ feature, I'm trying to make that clear. And
> I'm not so much in the "bloating the interpreter" camp or in the "slowing down
> the interpreter" camp because these days it just doesn't really matter that
> much. Clear code is far more important.
>
I am in the do not slow down the interpreter camp and the clear code camp. I do
not care too much if the executable grows a bit.
> Maybe it's just pie-in-the-sky idealism, but for me it has more to do with the
> overall look and feel of the language, which features /should/ be included
> because
> they fit the philosophy of the language and which are just the syntactic sugar
> flavor-of-the-week.
>
I am not against syntactic sugar as a lot of times the syntactic sugar is nice.
Many people consider the for loop syntactic sugar:
for a = 1 to length(lines) do
--body
end for
That's simply sugar for:
integer a
a = 1
while a < length(lines) do
-- body
a = a + 1
end while
What I am for is not to reduce 2 character here or there, but sugar above is
great stuff. It means I (the programmer) have to work less to achieve the same
goal. That's my end desire. Am I lazy? I guess one could say that, but if you
have a ditch to dig will you choose a spoon, a shovel or back hoe?
Now, I am also in the camp that says let's try to have one way of doing things.
I say try because, you could use a for or while loop to accomplish the same
thing, but each has their own benefit. They are not duplicating functionality. I
have used languages that have added every little new buzz word out there and they
are so complex it's no fun to program in. After all, I do like my programming
job, why? I think it's fun.
> I think there should be a compelling reason to add anything --feature or new
> built-in-- to the interpreter, and a broad consensus as well. Not just
> "because
> it's cool."
>
Again, can you please tell me what has been added to the interpreter "because
it's cool" ? In your opinion, I am not asking for fact, simply your opinion.
> Same rant, different day I guess.
> Heh, for true minimalism and performance I guess I can always just stick with
> C.
>
Hm, C has goto, right 
(added for goto fans, sorry, could not resist)
> But allow me to make a comparison -- in some ways, going from C (a beautiful
> language, IMO, missing some features) to C++ (not so beautiful, lots of
> little-used
> features) introduced a lot of power and expressiveness at the expense of a lot
> of clunkiness and ugliness. And some missing features remain missing, or at
> least non standard. I'd like to avoid that here.
>
Hm, I hardly think C to C++ is a valid comparison of Eu 3.1 to Eu 4.0.
--
Jeremy Cowgar
http://jeremy.cowgar.com
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