Transcript and Dot Notation

[Dan Shafer]

Seems like there's a fair bit of paranoia abroad in this land. Just
making dot syntax an alternative -- or even implementing OO syntax
using it -- doesn't have to corrupt the underlying Transcript syntax
*except* for those people who choose an  OO approach to their Rev
projects. Hand-wringing about all the books (how many are there
again?) and other documents suddenly moving away from the elegant
xTalk syntax to dot notation for everything isn't necessary or
appropriate because that's hardly inevitable.

The Lingo case study doesn't work here because Macromedia essentially
made an internal decision to move away from its proprietary syntax
(which was quite xTalk-like) to dot notation. I was keenly aware of
that decision-making process as a consultant to the company and I can
tell you they were under a lot of pressure from *customers* to make
that switch.

There are a lot of linguistic-design and other technical reasons
affecting language performance to consider the dot notation when you
get into the dynamic allocation of instance methods and properties.

Would you rather have:

(a) No object orientation
(b) OO with the current syntax with poor performance
or
(c) OO with dot notation and acceptable performance

I'm not saying those are the *only* choices but they're the big ones.

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
Get my book, "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
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