Why isn't Rev more popular?

Ken Ray kray at sonsothunder.com
Wed Dec 7 10:34:58 EST 2005


On 12/7/05 1:12 AM, "Geoff Canyon" <gcanyon at inspiredlogic.com> wrote:

> 
> On Dec 2, 2005, at 12:52 PM, Jeanne A. E. DeVoto wrote:
> 
>> Personally, I think the root cause of the problem is the inflexible
>> syntax for non-built-in commands and functions. What I'd like to
>> see is the ability to separate parameters with spaces as well as
>> commas, so you could do something like:
>> 
>>   on doSomething
>> thisParam,null1,null2,thatParam,null3,null4,theOtherParam
>>     -- code here
>>   end doSomething
>> 
>> called with:
>>   doSomething 2 times to "fox" in stack (the short name of me)
> 
> This sounds like AppleScript's Prepositional Parameters: <http://
> snipurl.com/ASPrepositional>
> 
> I love and hate this idea. Love it because, used properly, it would
> be great. Hate it because it's _hard_ work to define proper syntax,
> and therefore this feature would almost never be used properly.

Actually, since Jeanne was mentioning this for *non-built-in* commands and
functions, it would be up to the developer to define and use the syntax. I
used to do this in SuperCard, since they allow for spaces to separate
params. So I could do this:

on mouseUp
  tell (the long id of btn 1) to start
end mouseUp

and have a handler that looked like this:

on tell pObj,pTo,pCommand
  send pCommand to pObj
end tell

Notice that words like "to" and "in" would be parameters, but not used (as I
don't use pTo above), but it allows for a lot of flexibility in the
language.

I agree with Jeanne on this...

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com




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