Re: Euphoria Interpreter design
Jiri Babor <J.Babor at GNS.CRI.NZ> wrote:
>Sorry, Gabriel, I'll not quote you in full. It is too long, not enough
>substance. But I'll deal with some of the points.
>
>First, if I were in a less charitable mood, I would suggest you tried
>to muddy the waters with unrelated garbage: uninitialized variables,
>invalid subscripts, invalid parameters and the bad habits we
>programmers have learned from other programming languages. But I shall
>skip that today...
Actually, the main point of that first paragraph was to clarify the meaning
of the word "freedom" within the context of a programming language. However,
it probably didn't relate well enough to the rest of my post to justify its
inclusion. Hindsight is usually 20/20. Eventually.
>You also mentioned 'emotional appeals and verbal attacks' a couple of
>times. I am not sure what you meant by 'verbal attacks', but I could
>recognize the other one when I read, and I quote: "the willy-nilly way
>programmers can do things in QB, C or Cobol." All three prohibited
>words in a single sentence - it makes me cry.
Ouch. I hadn't noticed that. I meant the statement as more of a comparison
for reference, but it does indeed come across as an emotional appeal,
doesn't it? "All three prohibited words in a single sentence" -- that's
actually quite a funny observation. :)
As for the phrase "verbal attacks", some of your earlier statements inspired
my use of this phrase. The phrase "verbal attacks" is intended to describe
statements which do not necessarily advance a particular reason or
explanation for a particular viewpoint, but rather make strong, sometimes
angry, emotional statements which may or may not be entirely related to the
issue at hand. These "verbal attacks" usually tend to:
1) attack the person(s) espousing the opposite viewpoint, instead of the
viewpoint itself (i.e. your statement "Sorry, Daniel, but you and your
fellow travellers cannot trot out the same unjustifiable cliches every time
someone asks for a bit of programming freedom, and get away with it.")
2) attack the viewpoint by means of unrelated comparisons, or at least
comparisons which do not make sense in and of themselves, and require
further explanation to make them clear (i.e. "Declare-before-use' principle
enhances your programming roughly the same way a straight-jacket enhances
your mental health.", "And how running backwards or standing on my head
improves readability of anything is also a bit of a mystery, to me anyway.")
3) bait the other person(s) by making provocative statements which have
little or nothing to do with the issue (i.e. "And when you finally trap that
strange and elusive beast you call conceptual organization, enhanced or not,
please let me know, I sure want to see it.")
I apologize for being so pedantic, but you did mention that you were not
sure what was meant by the phrase "verbal attacks", and I wanted to make
sure you were clear on what I meant. :)
>And to be quite brutal, your pontifications about Euphoria before and
>after routine_id() do not help.
OHH!! How brutal!!! :)
Seriously, though, I don't know if "pontifications" is necessarily the
correct word. I was simply relating my initial experience with Euphoria, and
how the declare-before-use nature of routine definitions was a definite aid
to my learning experience. I also attempted to state how the introduction of
routine_id() has changed this simplicity, and ultimately how Euphoria *may*
need to be changed to allow forward-declarations in order to reconcile the
existence of routine_id(). I then attempted to detail an example of Euphoria
code which currently works just fine, but which would not work if
forward-declarations were allowed.
>Your impractical (your word!) example
>is even less useful.
It was "impractical" in the sense that it was not something one would
actually use in a real program. But then, many such examples are
"impractical" in this sense, while still being "useful" in the sense of
illustrating the point being made.
>(BTW, infinite mutual recursion is not such a big
>deal - you blow the stack before you blink. Simple infinite loops are
>much worse - unbreakable in pure DOS - and they happen far too often
>to me...)
I never said that infinite mutual recursion was a "big deal" -- again, it
was merely intended to illustrate how code that works perfectly fine in
Euphoria *now*, would have to be rewritten in the event that
forward-declarations are allowed.
>I am glad you have not made up your mind, obviously, which way to
>jump. But I am confident you will let us know if you ever do.
I promise, you'll be the first to know. :)
Gabriel Boehme
|
Not Categorized, Please Help
|
|
