OpenEuphoria

RE: Eu's poor design

• Posted by rforno at tutopia.com Aug 18, 2003
• 491 views

Regarding your proposal about integers wrapping around, I'm definitely
against it. This is just a drawback of C, C++ and Java.
Regards.
----- Original Message -----
From: Andreas Rumpf <pfropfen at gmx.net>
Subject: Eu's poor design


>
>
> 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
>
> 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.)
>
> - 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!)?
> 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!
>
> 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!)
>
> 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!
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
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>
>