OpenEuphoria

Random Issues

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds.msn at ATTCANADA.NET> Feb 04, 1999
• 434 views

Here are some brief replies to various issues:

Ralf writes:
> Euphoria is a stack-based interpreter

I don't know what that means. I think any
language interpreter will find stacks, call-stacks etc.
useful for various things, and will not depend only on the
machine stack.

Ralf writes:
> Arrays I want for the speed

Arrays would not be much faster than sequences.
Maybe 0 to 5 percent on typical operations.

Someone implied:
> [Euphoria insists on define-it before you use-it because
   it makes life much easier for the implementer - otherwise you'd
   need a 2-pass compiler.]

It would be very easy technically to allow forward references
without requiring any special pre-declarations.
Back in the pre-1.0 days I was considering doing this.
The compiler would just emit special internal opcodes
"call to yet-to-be-defined routine X", or "reference to yet-to-be-defined
variable Y". When the opcode was executed for the first time,
it would look up X or Y in the symbol  table and replace itself with the
normal opcode for calling a routine, or referencing a variable.

some people wrote:
[namespaces - Euphoria is uniquely bad - name conflicts]

The namespace situation will definitely be improved, but
have a look at how C's namespace system works.
It's similar to, but in many ways worse than Euphoria's.
In C, *all* non-private symbols are *global* unless you explicitly
declare them "static". In Euphoria, non-private symbols
are local to the file, unless you explicitly declare them "global".
For programmers, lazy people that they are, this makes a
huge difference. Stroustrup has admitted that C should
have been done the other way. People have written C programs of
millions of lines of code. C was not "held back" from
becoming a major language because of this.

Someone wrote:
[Euphoria will never make it into the big leagues because
it lacks, X, Y, Z features of established languages]

Suppose *Euphoria* were the established language, and
suppose I had just invented C++. People would say C++ is
an obvious loser because:
     * no subscript checking
     * no uninitialized variable checking
     * you have to compile and link after every  small change
     * no support for true dynamic storage allocation
     * you have to declare the size and type of everything
     * manual is over 1000 pages - no one will read it unless
        they can get a job in it

Someone wrote:
[the price of Euphoria is too low]

The RDS corporate philosophy:
    "We lose a little on each item, but we make up for it in quantity."

We were doing ok before the price cut, but
since cutting the price, we've seen a significant
increase in total dollars, so I guess we'll keep it low for now.  

Regards,
     Rob Craig
     Rapid Deployment Software
     http://members.aol.com/FilesEu/