The Documentation

[Ken Ray]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:23:17 +1000, Sarah Reichelt wrote:

> On 10/27/07, Mick Collins <mickclns at mac.com> wrote:
>> I'll throw in my 2 cents worth here.  After seeing the ad in a Rev
>> newsletter or some place like that, I got the Beginning Programming
>> for Dummies, and I was very, very, very disappointed.  Among other
>> things it seems like whoever wrote the Rev parts (and they were
>> sparser or fewer than I expected) had a week of casual experience /
>> looking at the Rev documentation at best.  The thing that especially
>> comes to mind is that in the Rev examples, over and over && was used
>> where it was obvious that the effects of & were intended, but that
>> wasn't the only thing.
> 
> I haven't read the book, but this is very disappointing as it was
> giving Rev an entry into a widely read series.
> 
> However the double-ampersand may not be an error. && concatenates two
> strings and adds a space between them. & just concatentates them as
> is. It may be that && was what was intended.

Sorry, Sarah, Mick's 100% right. I got the book when it first came out 
to review it, and after reading through it I found a bunch of errors in 
logic/etc. that I emailed to Lynn to make him aware, and possibly to 
have Wallace correct these in a later edition of the book (or his next 
book). One of the errors is the one Mick referenced... here's an 
example from the book:
--------
Both REALbasic and C++ also let you use the plus (+) sign to 
concatenate strings. However Revolution uses the dual ampersand symbols 
(&&) to concatenate strings like so:

  put "Joe Smith" into MyName
  put "Hello, " && MyName into message
--------

And here was my comment about that very topic to Lynn:

---
Actually only a single ampersand is used (&); using double ampersands 
(&&) adds a space. In fact the example would have two spaces between 
the comma and the MyName value. This error is repeated in examples 
throughout the entire book (p.116, p.117, etc.), and is restated 
incorrectly at the bottom of p.125: “Notice that C++ uses the double 
ampersand to represent the Boolean AND operator, but Revolution uses 
the double ampersand to concatenate strings” as well as on p.170: 
“Revolution uses the two ampersand symbols (&&) to add strings 
together.”
---

If anyone wishes to get the rest of the review (it's only two pages so 
it's not *that* bad), let me know off-list. Regardless of the errors 
(all of which are pretty minor IMHO), it did a great service in getting 
the Revolution name out there to a larger audience, IMHO. 


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