OpenEuphoria

Re: For loops

• Posted by Matt Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at gmail.?o?> Nov 19, 2007
• 604 views

Bernie Ryan wrote:
> 
> 
> What I am concerned about that the same thing is going to happen
> to the langauge that has happen with the win32lib.
> If you download a windows program from the archive 70% will not
> run because there have been so many changes made over time in
> the library and older versions of win32lib are gone.
> What will happen when a new user tries to run some older demos
> and they don't run out of the box and the original coder is no
> longer available.
> That is not going to entice new user to adopt the langauge.
> That same thing is going to happen to the Euphoria.
> I think if you truly want to change the interpreter dramatically it should
> be accomplished by writing a totally new separate interpreter.

All software does this over time.  You're arguing for a static language,
and that's just not going to happen.  We could also argue that there are
additional features that would entice new users to adopt euphoria.  Leaving
them out will turn those users away from Euphoria.

I think that if we're going to change the interpreter dramatically, we had 
better think it through in detail and make sure that we really want those
changes.  We need to decide if the trade off between the new functionality
is worth the potential lack of backwards compatibility.  

It's not worth losing a lot of our legacy code for some minor upgrades 
that will benefit few people.  

But it's worth losing old [unsupported] win32lib programs in order to get 
rid of the onX[] syntax.

But there are a lot of things that can be done without breaking old code.
And many of those will make some problems easier to solve.  Now if only
we could all agree on which ones...

Matt