Transcript and Dot Notation

[John Vokey]

All,
I'd rather stick pins in my eyes.  Seriously:  what is gained here  
that can't be accomplished with either a) copy and paste (my  
favourite) or b) object duplication (my next favourite)?

I have programmed in virtually every language extant (and many no  
longer), including most machine languages, assemblers, and their ugly  
``high-level'' equivalents (e.g., C, C++), flipping (real) switches  
in octal on the face of the ``computer'' to initialise the ``boot- 
loader'' so that the machine could get started.  I do not need, want,  
or care about OO-dot.syntax shite except that it is a terribly ugly,  
long-winded, opaque way of doing the obvious. Transcript is easy for  
*everyone*, beginner or expert; that is its 5th GL glory.

We *could* require programming RR in pdp-8l assembler (which, no  
doubt, would thrill most of the old pdp-8l assembler programmers--of  
which I am one), but what of it?  Who would think that was an  
advance?  How about DEC-Basic (also on pdp-8l computers)?  HP rpl  
code (I have hundreds of HP-21C programs that would benefit)?  How  
about APL? I loved that language (even though it required a strange  
type-ball on the IBM selectrics we used as terminals to the  
university mainframe)!  Forth?  Really, TILs (threaded interpretative  
languages), like forth, have long been known to be the fastest, most  
concise languages of all time---often beating optimised compiled  
languages (like C, which is well known to be slower than languages  
such as Pascal).  Fortran? Wait, I really liked fortran...  Apple  
floating-point Basic?  Yeah (especially if the ROM code were  
included; I have all those old Apple ][ programs and subroutines just  
waiting...)!  6502 assembler?  Yes!  I was a wizard at that shite  
(using multiple entries into the same code to do different things to  
save a single byte of code--those were the days!).

Bottom line?  Tried them all (conducted research, published, even  
published code in most).  I like/love transcript (aka metatalk,  
hypertalk).  I get more done in minutes than I ever did in hours with  
these other languages/systems.  Which is why I use RR/MC.  The rest  
can just f-f-f-f-f-ade away...


On 26-Feb-06, at 9:47 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> Perhaps a few of you around here will find this funny, I could do  
> an implementation of OOPs with a pull-parser.  The trick to  
> creating a child object is to assign attributes of the parent  
> object to a child object. What is needed during the birthing  
> process is an allocation of memory to store the newly incarnated  
> child and to act on it independently while effecting the parent  
> that can also have global changing effects if desired.

--
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html>

-Dr. John R. Vokey