Category:Phix: Difference between revisions
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Phix applies the principle of least surprise, for instance in some languages <tt>myproc(list)</tt> or <tt>res = myfunc(list)</tt> can mangle list, whereas in Phix if you actually want that to happen you would code <tt>list = myproc(list)</tt> (and myproc would need to become a function) or <tt>{res,list} = myfunc(list)</tt>. Likewise 1/2 is 0.5 (not 0, unless you explicitly ask for the floor()) and 0-1 is -1 (not +MAXINT). A core tenet is that for any line of code there is one and only one possible interpretation of it, and said meaning is utterly intuitive. True fact: the given answer for the question "describe what f(a++) does" in "More Exceptional C++" lists 4 possibilities for f, and 3 for a (so 12 in total) and uses the phrase "could mean just about anything" not once but twice - shudder.
Phix
The fundamental goal of Phix is to make debugging easier, a whole subject area that does not seem to get the attention it deserves, despite several studies finding that most programmers actually spend between 70 and 90% of their time debugging.
Since 1.0.0 you can also run (many/most) Phix programs in a browser, by using pwa/p2js (as included in the distro) to transpile the program to JavaScript (plus a bit of standard HTML and CSS). If you see "'''with javascript_semantics'''" it means the program has been tested and works fine, both on the (Windows/Linux) desktop/Phix and in a browser via pwa/p2js, and in fact unix_dict() has been added to avoid reading unixdict.txt. Conversely, "without js" being present on a rosettacode entry means that (for instance) it uses the local file system, and is therefore desktop/Phix only. It is worth pointing out that "with js" and deep_copy() have proved ''staggeringly'' effective and nowhere near as painful as first feared. In just a few months (1.0.0 was released in July 2021) I have tested, fixed where necessary, and marked as javascript compatible ''[https://www.rosettacode.org/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=phixonline some 650 rosettacode entries]'' for Phix, and only ''[https://www.rosettacode.org/mw/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=notonline one tenth]'' of that have as yet been marked incompatible. The [https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Phix/online Phix/online] subcategory lists just shy of 50 entries deemed interesting enough to bother (manually) uploading to the Phix website, and the next goal is to get pwa/p2js itself runnning online, but obviously without using file i/o directly.
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