What is "Open Language"?

[Rick Harrison]

Hi Mark,

Whenever one deprecates code, it destroys someone’s code somewhere.
Don’t do it.

I had a project I had worked on for 10 years of my life.  It encompassed
over 70,000 lines of hard won hand-written code.  One day the company
who was producing the language decided to make some major changes
deprecating much of the language.  There was no migration tool provided
by the company to make the changes painless.

I spent yet another year of my life hand coding the changes to get the code
working again.  Two years later, the company did the same thing yet again!
I couldn’t afford to go through the process yet again.  My code was
basically destroyed by the company by deprecation of the code base.

A work around is to let all previous versions work, and put the final winning
candidate into the dictionary, the others will no longer appear in the
documentation.  This solves the problem with the least disruption as it
doesn’t break anyone’s code, but helps to streamline the desired future
syntax for the language.

Just my 2 cents for the day.

Cheers,

Rick




 
> On Oct 26, 2015, at 5:00 AM, Mark Waddingham <mark at livecode.com> wrote:
> 
> So, I do think that in this case it would be far better to *choose* what variant spelling is the normative one and deprecate all the other synonyms at least until there is a much better mechanism in place for parsing and resolving synonyms (i.e. when compound properties are specified as separate words, and synonyms are substitutions done as a pre-processing step).