Array of struct And to And onto and ...

Jean-Michel Lekston jm.lekston at idvector.com
Mon May 27 05:19:01 EDT 2002


>From : mark mitchell
>Actually, the syntax is very easy and the grammar is obvious IF you are a
native English speaker. (Except for that damn onTO
>required for 'place', which gets me every time.  I'm sure others can think of
their own pet peeves :-)
>Alas, it is (currently) an English dominated world.
>Perhaps someone should start translating Xtalk into Arabic or something, just
in case.

There is common mistake to think that computer language must be as near as
possible to human pratical language. A computer language is more formal
(mathematic) than natural (english). In french we have two words to
distinguish this two practises:
 Natural language  are "Langues" or tongue if you want and  formal are
"Langage" or language.
They are very differents.(shortly) Formal is used to express logical
assertion. Natural language is used to express evrything else (shopping,
poetry,football narrator,...) , due to this king of pollution natural
language is not adapt to express logical assertion, this is why one
developped formal language. Physics law (mecanics law, electronic law) seems
to fit this kind of language,  so computer , wich are an electronic state of
nature, are well  discribe  by formal language.

But for human interface, one try to build "advanced" language (modular,
human readable ...) to describe algorithm. C,Java,python, perl ... Are
samples of  powered formals languages (easy to read, short expression,
reuse, portable ...) and they are not necessarly near to a particular
natural language.

The readablity of a code source depend more on write convention,
documentation and words  choose  than on the grammar.

I said that X-talk (aka hyper-talk) is poor (not powered computer language)
because it is very constrained one.
What about structure ? (Or Class in object point of view)
What about references
What about memory managing?
What about Multi-threading ?
What about paradigm (event-drive, procedural, GUI oriented.
 why stacks, groups, cards are fixed => Closed API...  ?
Is - there a well defined grammar rules (as we can find for most of
language) ?

In fact i preferred said that x-talk (hyper-talk) is a simple script/macro
language for event call-back of a GUI RAD

JML

 




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