OpenEuphoria

Types

• Posted by Don Phillips <EuNexus at yahoo.com> Oct 14, 2003
• 634 views

Just my personal opinion of something I would like to see come down the 
pipe some time in the near future hint hint =)

My current beef is with custom types...

=====
Example:

type hour(integer x)
   return x >= 0 and x <= 23
end type

hour h1, h2

h1 = 10      -- ok
h2 = 25      -- error! program aborts with a message
=====

Easy to understand yes, but most (actually just about all) of the 
regular types in other languages just dont behave this way.  What I 
would like to propose is more control and flexibility over the final 
outcome of a variables value.

=====
Example:

type hour(integer x)
   while x < 0 do
      x += 24
   end while

   while x > 23 do
      x -= 24
   end while

   return x -- assigned back to variable
end type

hour h1, h2

h1 = 10      -- ok
h2 = 25      -- ok, h2 is actually assigned the value of 1
=====

While I do agree that the above case is rather striking in its 
appearance and effects, and if misused could seriously create hard to 
track down bugs, but I also think this kind of addition would create 
clearer code in most cases.

In addition, it also paves the way for some very interesting 
possibilities like default parameters and other such things...

=====
type args(object params)
   -- {required,def=1,def=2}
   if atom(params)
      return( {params,1,2} )
   else
      if length(params) = 1 then
         return( params & 1 & 2 )
      elsif length(params) = 2
         return( params & 2 )
      end if
   end if
   return( params[1..3] )
end type
=====

Heh, aww nevermind me... im just blabbing...
I would never actually expect anything like this to actually make it 
into production as it violates too many of Euphorias principles.

IMO though it would be nice to have ,)