The Euphoria Programming Language

Published on 14 February 2023 (Updated: 27 March 2023)

Welcome to the Euphoria page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

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Description

According to OpenEuphoria, Euphoria is an imperative interpretive programming language has the following features:

There are only four different data types:

According to Wikipedia, there is no actual string data type. Instead a string is just a sequence of atoms. For example:

"ABC"

is actually this:

{65, 66, 67}

User-specified data types can be done based on these four data types. The way this is done is to declare a type function that validates the input value. For example, if you wanted to define an hour type that only allowed integers from 0 to 23, you would do this:

type hour(integer x)
    return x >= 0 and x <= 23
end type

Keywords in Euphoria are rather simple. For each type of keyword that does control flow or declares a function or procedure (more on that later), there is a corresponding end keyword that declares the end of that structure. For example:

if x = 42
then
    do_something_cool(x)
end if

Euphoria makes the distinction between functions and procedures. Functions returns values, whereas procedures do not (think of it like a void function in C). For example:

function foo(integer bar)
    return bar + 100
end function

The above function foo just returns the value of bar plus 100. Here's an example of a procedure:

procedure baz(sequence s)
    fputs(1, s & '\n')
end procedure

The above procedure baz just outputs a string with a newline to standard out.

Parameter passing in Euphoria is rather unique. According to Wikipedia:

Arguments to routines are always passed by value; there is no pass-by-reference facility. Parameters are allowed to be modified locally (i.e., within the callee) which is implemented very efficiently as sequences have automatic copy-on-write semantics. In other words, when you pass a sequence to a routine, initially only a reference to it is passed, but at the point the routine modifies this sequence parameter the sequence is copied and the routine updates only a copy of the original.

If you'd like more information about this language, please see the OpenEuphoria manual.

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