Oct 03

This is part 5 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

Euphoria is a powerful yet simple interpreted programming language.  “Euphoria” is an acronym for “End-User Programming with Hierarchical Objects for Robust Interpreted Applications.”

Euphoria was developed to be easier to learn and use than BASIC, but with high-level constructs.  Euphoria supports both loose and strict variable typing.  Euphoria functions are naturally generic and can operate on any type of data.  Euphoria is not object-oriented, yet it achieves many of the benefits of OO languages in a simpler way.

Euphoria programs run on Windows, Linux, or DOS.  Euphoria includes a high-performance interpreter that’s 10-30 times faster than conventional interpreters such as Microsoft QBasic, Perl and Python.  A source debugger and execution profiler are included, along with an open-source file editor that’s itself written in Euphoria.

Why Euphoria?

Robert Craig of of Rapid Deployment Software developed Euphoria as a personal project to invent a programming language from scratch.  Euphoria’s first version was on an Atari Mega-ST but never released.  The first public release of Euphoria was for the 32-bit DOS platform in July 1993.  Euphoria v3.0 was the first open-source version, released in 2006.

“Hello, World” in Euphoria

puts( 1, "Hello World!n" )

References

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Article published on October 3, 2008




7 Responses to “Euphoria: Obscure Programming Language of the Month”

  1. melajara Says:

    There are interesting parallels between Euphoria and Boo, e.g. their suitability for scripting and scratch code development and for this, their elegant support for mundane task like list composition or array slicing. I had a very enjoyable experience with the well named Euphoria language back to 1994. Now Boo is really shining for metaprogramming projects it has even a JVM backend and thus can interoperate with Java instead of CLI + .NET via the BooJay plugin for Eclipse, highly recommended.

  2. amt Says:

    somewhat addicted, i wrote my first biggish application with it around 2003…comes with an excellent manual, unlike the drudging Java affair.

  3. matsu Says:

    Big fan of Euphoria. Fast, simple, and easy to create standalone packages. Even comes with a E to C translator that allows you to compile your project.

  4. Jeremy Cowgar Says:

    One thing to note is that we have now released 4.0 RC1 which is the largest update to Euphoria ever. We are shooting for before Christmas for 4.0 final.

  5. J.Noble Says:

    I have used Euphoria for years and love it.
    It’s easy and very powerful !!

  6. Dave Farrell Says:

    After Robert Craig release Euphoria as open source, it has been losing users due to the incompetence of current developers. Users always face problems with either the language itself or the site openeuphoria.org. Really a pitty. Used to be a great programming language.

  7. Alan Oxley Says:

    The 4.0 rc1 is a massive update since going open source. Certainly worth a look even if you tried Euphoria before.

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