[ ESL - Guidelines ]

Euphoria Standard Library (ESL) - Goals

Goals of the project

Status of this topic : Agreed upon

The Euphoria Standard Library (ESL) is meant as a supplement of the library that is included in the official release of the Euphoria programming language interpreter, created by RDS. Its objective is to provide frequently used constants, types, functions, and procedures (in the form of source code) that are not contained in the official release, but that are often used and that are part of the standard distribution of other programming languages.

For several years, many Euphoria programmers have written a total of more than 1400 user contributions, which can be downloaded from the archives at RDS's website. Almost all of them are written by a single person. Their quality varies from contributions by highly qualified I.T. professionals and university research scientists, to the first programming steps of beginners. Sometimes looking in the archieves for a certain module is like searching for a needle in a haystack, and after having found something, it might be hard to consider especially for inexperienced programmers, whether or not that code is reliable.

Since the system of unrelated individual user contributions is just "patchwork", several routines (e.g. for reading a null-terminated string from memory) are contained in many contributions, and maybe the user also has written such a function himself. This is a common source for naming conflicts. This also means re-inventing the wheel several times, which is an unnecessary waste of time and efforts.

To address these issues, we created the Euphoria Standard Library:

• It provides standard routines that are well known from other programming languages, such as trim(), replace(), split(), etc.
  This especially makes translating code from other programming languages much easier. This is important for Euphoria programmers, since many interesting algorithms are not implemented in Euphoria, but in more "mainstream" languages.
  This also makes it easier for programmers to migrate from other languages to Euphoria.
• It provides routines and constants which are standard in their respective field, e.g. math functions such as abs(), ceil(), trunc(), and the constant E. Most people expect a programming language to cover such functions.
• We hope that this library will be accepted by the Euphoria programming community as a standard, so that e.g. programmers of other libraries can concentrate on their real goal, and don't have to re-invent certain utility routines for the 57^th time.
  When special libraries only contain their special code, and standard code is concentrated in the Euphoria Standard Library, it will also mean that all the Euphoria code on our hard disks will be much better organized. Having only 1 abs() function and 1 string() type rather than multiple ones can mean a considerable reduction of naming conflicts.
• Code and documentation are written according to an internal standard.
• New modules are not written ad hoc. The way they are created also follows an internal standard.