Re: Eu's poor design
On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 11:47:14AM +0000, Andreas Rumpf wrote:
>
>
> Lets face it, at its current state, Euphoria is rather useless for
> programming real applications, for several reasons:
> It lacks:
> - Call by reference (the most important feature I want to add!):
> Some say, it isn't needed in Eu, because you can simply return
> a sequence. Yes, that's true. But apart from being tedious to type,
> it makes the code much less efficient.
> example:
> seq[2][3][5] = func(seq[2][3][5]) -- this is just stupid
We have call by reference, of sorts. Via routine_id().
Also, for emulation of pass by reference:
global sequence x
...initialize x here...
procudure g(integer i, object v)
? x[i]
x[i] = v
end procedure
integer z
z = 5
x[z] = "hi"
g(z, "bye")
? x[z]
which is ugly, but still possible.
>
> So for real applications I would use global variables all over the place
> (like the other Eu programmers do). (Great improvement over call by
> reference!)
>
> (The reason why call by reference is missing is probably because Rob
> didn't understand functional programming properly. Hey Rob, Euphoria is
> no functional language! If you wanted to make a functional programming
> language, why did you implement variables and loops? Recursion &
> constants would do.)
>
Are you against variables and loops then?
> - Block comments: While they are not essential, it is really dump
> to put "--" before any line if I just want to comment out some code for
> a short period time. Apart from that, line comments (though being very
> useful!) are really inconsequent: If line endings are not important for
> the Eu interpreter why are comments/include statements different? And
> why use -- for line comments when # would do (#! is allowed in the first
> line for linux compability anyway!)?
What is used as the comment character is a minor detail.
Also, # is used for hexidecimal in Euphoria.
> By the way, the scanner should not be line-based for Euphoria (although
> Rob probably did it this way - nobody knows why, it doesn't make much
> sense), so block comments are NOT harder to scan than line comments!
>
> But there are other drawbacks:
> allocate() and free() ??? I thought Euphoria had a garbage collector!
These are for low level programming (i.e. interfacing with the OS
or with C routines in .dll or .so files). They aren't meant for use in
pure Eu programming but when mixing with elements outside of your program
(such as a third party dll file written in C).
>
> If Euphoria is intended for programming newbies, why is Euphoria case
> sensitive? (Why are so many languages case sensitive by the way? That
> way I have to remember exactly how the identifier was being written!)
>
If a person cant be case sensitive that person will have big problems
being a programmer, period.
> I used to use hashing a lot. Guess what, in Euphoria most hash functions
> can't be implemented (or only with poor performance!), because integers
> don't wrap around but are converted to floating point when they get to
> big!
>
>
Yes, that is annoying. But, that is actually a newbie friendly function!
Also, doesnt use of the 'integer' type prevent this? Since its
never a floating point number...
> This is really annoying because Euphoria is a great language full of
> good ideas. I like it for small scripting tasks, but it is simply not
> suited well for bigger programming tasks.
Well, it can be, but it would be cumbersome to use in many cases due to a
lot of missing pieces.
>
>
>
> TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE!
>
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