OpenEuphoria

Re: New to Euphoria

• Posted by Irv <irv at ELLIJAY.COM> May 11, 1998
• 500 views

At 05:58 PM 5/11/98 -0400,  Alan Tu wrote:

>I just subscribed to this list yesterday.

Welcome!

>I consider myself a very gaullible person, so I do believe what the
>documentation says about Euphoria being easier and more powerful than
>BASIC, and most other languages, for that matter.  (Hey, even before I
>subscribed to this list, I told someone I knew who was managing a C proje=
>ct
>to take the file C.DOC (which I sent to him) and show it to his
>programmers.

You're living dangerously. Those programmers are likely to
react badly to any criticism of their language of choice
(a.k.a. Job Security)

>I finished my first useful program in QBasic.
>I just downloaded Euphoria not too long ago, and I want to hear >a BASIC
(former BASIC, I suppose) programmer compares >BASIC to Euphoria.  I suppose
I've read the technical >differences from the documentation, but I would
like to get an >intuitive, personal account.  Is Euphoria really easier?

I wrote my first for-money program in BASIC, about 20 years
ago, a program to manage materials flow for a recycling firm.
I also realised I had reached the limits of BASIC - let's call
it the "brick wall". That's when it becomes almost impossible
to add even one more thing to your program without it
blowing up permanently. Or, in the case of BASIC, runs
so slowly no one wants to use it.

As soon as Borland began selling Turbo Pascal, with many
useful features, I moved to that, then COBOL (job requirement),
and more recently Delphi and others. All of these languages
have their own "brick wall", some just hit it sooner than others.
Euphoria is no exception; but it is a *huge* improvement over
BASIC, and way simpler than C.

If you don't know BASIC very well, you will have an easier
time learning Euphoria. Not so many bad practices to unlearn.
If you know C, Euphoria looks familiar, but with lots less
"dirty work" to do (type casting and pointer manipulation)
If you know Pascal, Euphoria looks very familiar, but
again, there's less type casting required.

If you're just starting, Euphoria will help you learn to write programs in a
"structured" manner - always a good thing.

Irv
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