counter++ versus "add 1 to counter

Graham Samuel livfoss at blueyonder.co.uk
Sun Mar 21 16:41:02 EST 2004


On Sun, 21 Mar 2004 17:01:16 -0100, "A.C.T." <albrecht at act-net.com> wrote:

>[...]
>
>Most likely true - just as the oposite: Why isn't "basename" or
>"dirname" present, both being substantial functions for everyone who is
>dealing with files all day? No, don't answer it, it's just an example to
>show: Everyone has a specific environment he comes from.

Yes, absolutely, and I think your comments show very clearly that you come 
from a certain environment, a certain linguistic and development context, 
and one which is highly technical and codified. Sorry after all to ignore 
your "don't answer it", but I work with files every day and have never 
needed to use "basename" or "dirname" - this isn't good or bad, it's just a 
different experience from yours. What is clear from your comments is that 
unlike many of us you don't need any comfort factors, 'syntactic sugar' to 
get your programming done, so the English-like feel to xTalk languages is 
more of a hindrance than a help to you. But Ken Ray is right to say

>...Revolution is not targeted at low level programmers, but is more
>targeted at other 4GL programmers (people who have worked with Visual Basic,
>Macromedia Director, Flash, etc.) and people who haven't had much
>programming experience in the past and "just want to get the job done"...

What I think you should be able to appreciate and even get fond of, is the 
way in which in Transcript, whole quanta of functionality are encapsulated 
in simple structures, commands and functions and made to work 
cross-platform. You get a clearer expressed and more rapidly developed 
result in Transcript (and to a great extent, other xTalks) than you can 
possibly do in lower-level languages. For many Revolution developers, this 
makes RunRev the only game in town.

Graham

(BTW in the distant past, I programmed in languages only one step up from 
binary code, and sometimes did actually debug at the binary level: and 
every time I've managed to get up a level in the hierarchy of languages, 
I've felt happier for it).


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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France  




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