counter++ versus "add 1 to counter"

[Scott Rossi]

On 3/21/04 7:45 AM, "A.C.T." <albrecht at act-net.com> wrote:

> I understand "Transcript" is trying to be a chimere of
> "human language" (which uses redundancy to gain clearness) and
> "progamming language" (which avoids redundancy to gain clearness). The
> drawback is that you (the developer) have to EXACTLY now what the
> language (Transcript) will do if you tell it something, whereas a
> "classic" high level language like C will ONLY do what you tell it,
> returning an error if you did not use the right variable type.

This is an interesting point of view Marc, but I wonder if you are basing
your point of view on your knowledge of C.  Look at your example:

  counter++

 "..what "counter++" does: Increment a value (by one). That's clear and
  there's no doubt about what is meant."

Stepping back from your knowledge of C, I would argue the above is not
clear.  How do you know the counter is incremented by 1?  No value is
indicated so how does someone know a value of 1 is used?  Maybe the use of
"++" means add counter to itself?  Maybe the value to be added was left out
of the code by mistake?

I know the previous statements are all wrong, but I'm suggesting that if you
look objectively at that example, it is no clearer or more confusing than
"add 1 to counter".  And, if I understand what are saying, Transcript does
in fact return an error if you use incorrect variable types:

  put "xyz" into A
  add 7 to A

Will return an error as 'A' is not a number.

It's true, you "have to EXACTLY [k]now what the language (Transcript) will
do if you tell it something", but I expect the same goes for any programming
language, as demonstrated by your example.  I would offer that Transcript
(and all xtalk for that matter) does not use redundancy to gain clearness,
but instead uses redundancy to gain flexibility.

Your turn...  :-)

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Development & Design
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