synonyms

[Richmond Mathewson]

I think that it is probably generally true that the more synonyms and 
ways of saying the same thing a language has,
the easier it is to learn.

This is also borne out by Linguistic research.

Today I had 7 children who ALL wrote LiveCode scripts to do a Bubble 
Sort fo 6 fields containing numbers; they
were all different to greater or lesser degress, and they all did the job!

Thankyou HyperCard, MetaCard and LiveCode for making your programming 
"thingy" the way you did!

Richmond.

On 6/26/17 8:59 pm, Mark Wieder via use-livecode wrote:
> On 06/26/2017 03:55 AM, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:
>
>> I think it is probably generally true that the more consistent and 
>> simpler the language is, the easier it is to learn.
>
> ...and I would follow that with the (long-running by now) argument 
> that synonyms provide for an ease-of-use facility in coding and 
> therefore a simpler approach to using the language. For the trivial 
> case here, if I can't remember whether the language supports "is" or 
> "=" for variable assignments, I can use one or the other without 
> having to interrupt my train of thought to look it up in the 
> dictionary/guides.
>
> One of LiveCode's strengths is the fact that there are many possible 
> solutions to a given problem, and the xtalk language allows much 
> flexibility in solving it. For a problem placed before any three 
> coders, you will find at least four different solutions. Limiting the 
> language limits the ways in which a problem may be thought of - that's 
> the basis of the linguistic relativism, and it applies to programming 
> languages as well as to natural languages.
>