     ---> Is this the latest version of Euphoria?
          Visit:  http://www.RapidEuphoria.com

     ---> To install/uninstall Euphoria, see install.htm

     ---> What's new in this release?
          See relnotes.doc
Euphoria Programming Language version 3.1
Welcome to Euphoria! ... | E nd U ser P rogramming with H ierarchical O bjects for R obust I nterpreted A pplications
Euphoria has come a long way since v1.0 was released in July 1993. There are now thousands of users around the world. There's an automated discussion forum, managed and moderated by a Euphoria program, and supporting over 500 subscribers. The Euphoria Web site contains over 1600 contributed .zip files packed with Euphoria source programs and library routines. Dozens of people have set up their own independent Web pages with Euphoria-related content. Euphoria has been used in a variety of commercial programs. The Windows version has been used to create numerous GUI, utility and Internet-related programs. The DOS version has been used to create many exciting high-speed action games, complete with Sound Blaster sound effects. The Linux and FreeBSD versions have been used to write X Windows GUI programs, Web-based (CGI) programs, and lots of useful tools and utilities. Yet Another Programming Language? Euphoria is a very-high-level programming language with several features that set it apart from the crowd: Euphoria programs run on Windows, DOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. Euphoria is free and open source. The complete source code for the Euphoria interpreter, translator and binder is included in the download package. The language is flexible, powerful, and easy to learn. There is no waiting for compiles and links - just edit and run. You can create and distribute a royalty-free, stand-alone .exe file. Dynamic storage allocation is fundamental to Euphoria. Variables grow or shrink in size without the programmer having to worry about allocating and freeing chunks of memory. Elements of an array (Euphoria sequence) can be a dynamic mixture of different types and sizes of data. Euphoria provides extensive run-time error checking for: out-of-bounds subscripts, uninitialized variables, bad parameter values for library routines, illegal value assigned to a variable, and many more. If something goes wrong you'll get a full error message, with a call traceback and a listing of variable values. With other languages you'll typically get protection faults with useless dumps of machine registers and addresses. The Euphoria interpreter is more than 30 times faster than either Perl or Python, and it's considerably faster than all other interpreted languages, according to the "Great Computer Language Shootout" benchmark (see demo\bench\bench.doc). If that isn't enough, there's a Euphoria To C Translator that can translate any Euphoria program to C, and boost your speed even more. Why waste time debugging hand-coded C/C++? You can easily develop a Euphoria program, and then generate the C code. Euphoria programs are not constrained by any 640K memory restrictions for which MS-DOS is infamous. All versions of Euphoria let you use all the memory on your system, and if that isn't enough, a swap file on disk will provide additional virtual memory. An integrated, easy-to-use, full-screen source-level debugger/tracer is included. Both an execution-count profiler, and a time profiler are available. There is a large and rapidly growing collection of excellent 3rd party programs and libraries, most with full source code. RDS has developed an extremely flexible database system (EDS) that is portable across all Euphoria platforms. The WIN32 implementation of Euphoria can access any WIN32 API routine, as well as C or Euphoria routines in .DLL files. A team of people has developed a Windows GUI library (Win32Lib), complete with a powerful Interactive Development Environment. You can design a user interface graphically, specify the Euphoria statements to be executed when someone clicks, and the IDE will create a complete Euphoria program for you. There are Windows Euphoria libraries for Internet access, 3-D games, and many other application areas. The DOS32 implementation of Euphoria on MS-DOS contains a built-in graphics library. If necessary, you can access DOS software interrupts. You can call machine-code routines. You can even set up your own hardware interrupt handlers. Many high-speed action games, complete with Sound Blaster sound effects, have been developed 100% in Euphoria, without the need for any machine code. The Linux and FreeBSD implementations of Euphoria let you access C routines and variables in shared libraries, for tasks ranging from graphics, to X windows GUI programming, to Internet CGI programming. The good news is, you'll be programming in Euphoria, not C. Platforms and Products Euphoria runs on four different platforms, WIN32, DOS32, Linux, and FreeBSD. This Euphoria Interpreter, Translator and Binder package is free for anyone to use. Using the Euphoria Binder you can shroud (encrypt) and bind any Euphoria program with a copy of the interpreter back-end, to create a single, stand-alone, tamper-resistant .exe file for easy distribution. See bind.doc) The Euphoria To C Translator converts any Euphoria program into a stand-alone .exe file, but it has the added advantage of boosting the program's speed as well. To use it, you must have one of 7 free C compilers installed on your machine, but no knowledge of C is required. The documentation contained in this package comes in both plain text and HTML form. The plain text (.doc) files can be viewed with any text editor, such as Windows NotePad or WordPad. The HTML (.htm) files can be viewed with your Web browser. A tool that we developed in Euphoria allows us to automatically generate both plain text and HTML files, from a common source. Thus the content of each file in the doc subdirectory should be identical to the content of the corresponding file in the html subdirectory, aside from the lack of links, fonts, colors, etc. See doc\overview.doc (or html\overview.htm) for a summary of the documentation files. You can freely distribute the Euphoria interpreter, and any other files contained in this package, in whole or in part, so anyone can run a Euphoria program that you have developed. You are completely free to distribute any Euphoria programs that you write. To run the WIN32 version of Euphoria, you need Windows 95 or any later version of Windows. It runs fine on XP. The DOS32 version will run on any version of Windows, and will also run on plain DOS on any 386 or higher processor. Contrary to popular opinion, DOS is not dead. You can run DOS Euphoria programs on Windows XP in a command prompt window. To run the Linux version of Euphoria you need any reasonably up-to-date Linux distribution, that has libc6 or later. For example, Red Hat 5.2 or later will work fine. To run the FreeBSD version of Euphoria you need any reasonably up-to-date FreeBSD distribution. Getting Started
0. | The Euphoria interpreter is an engine for running Euphoria programs. It does not have a fancy GUI interface. When you are ready to do Windows GUI programming, you should download Judith Evans' IDE (written in open source Euphoria code). It will provide you with a very nice graphical environment for Windows programming. For most other programming, all you really need is an editor, such as NotePad.
1. | After you install Euphoria, the documentation files will be in the doc and html directories. overview.doc gives an overview of the documentation. refman.htm (or refman.doc) should be read first. If you want to search for information on any topic, type guru.
2. | Have fun running the programs in the demo directory. Feel free to modify them, or run them in trace mode by adding:
            with trace
            trace(1)
| as the first two lines in the .ex or .exw file.
3. | Try typing in some simple statements and running them. You can use any text editor. Later you may want to use the Euphoria editor, ed, or download David Cuny's Euphoria editor from the Euphoria Web site. Don't be afraid to try things. Euphoria won't bite!
4. | See what2do.doc for more ideas.
5. | Visit the Euphoria Web site, download some files, and subscribe to the Euphoria mailing list.
If you are new to programming, and you find refman.htm hard to follow, download David Gay's interactive tutorial called "A Beginner's Guide To Euphoria". It's in the Documentation section of our Archive. If you have any trouble installing, see install.doc Notice to Shareware Vendors: We encourage you to distribute this Euphoria Interpreter package. You can charge whatever you like for it. People can use Euphoria for as long as they like without obligation. DISCLAIMER: Euphoria is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. In no event shall Rapid Deployment Software be held liable for any damages arising from the use of, or inability to use, this product.