E(ID:1989/e::002)
Polymorphic procedural language for the Amiga
Wouter van Oortmerssen.
Procedural language for Amiga with lists, low-level polymorphism, exception handling, quoted expressions, pattern matching, object inheritance.
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Extract: Introduction
Introduction to Amiga E
To interact with your Amiga you need to speak a language it understands. Luckily, there is a wide choice of such languages, each of which fits a particular need. For instance, BASIC (in most of its flavours) is simple and easy to learn, and so is ideal for beginners. Assembly, on the other hand, requires a lot of effort and is quite tedious, but can produce the fastest programs so is generally used by commercial programmers. These are two extremes and most businesses and colleges use C or Pascal/Modula-2, which try to strike a balance between simplicity and speed.
E programs look very much like Pascal or Modula-2 programs, but E is based more closely on C. Anyone familiar with these languages will easily learn E, only really needing to get to grips with E's unique features and those borrowed from other languages. This guide is aimed at people who haven't done much programming and may be too trivial for competent programmers, who should find the E Reference Manual more than adequate (although some of the later sections offer different explanations to the Reference Manual, which may prove useful).
Part One (this part) goes through some of the basics of the E language and programming in general. Part Two delves deeper into E, covering the more complex topics and the unique features of E. Part Three goes through a few example programs, which are a bit longer than the examples in the other Parts. Finally, Part Four contains the Appendices, which is where you'll find some other, miscellaneous information
Resources
- Copy at wu archive
" - Amiga E Compiler home page
For those who don't know: E is an object-oriented/procedural/unpure functional/whatever language with quite a popular implementation on the amiga. It's mainly influenced by languages such as C++, Ada, Lisp etc., and features extremely fast compilation, inline assembler, large set of integrated functions, powerful module concept, flexible type-system, quoted expressions, immediate and typed lists, parametric and object polymorphism, exception handling, inheritance, data-hiding, methods, multiple return values, default arguments, register allocation, fast memory management, unification, LISP-Cells, macro-preprocessing, a very powerful source-level debugger, gui-toolkit, library linker, and then some. (oh yes: and it was designed and implemented by me :-)external link