Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Frank Leahy]

On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 07:44  AM, 
use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:
> Frank,
>
> If you want dot notation and equals signs, why wouldn't you just use 
> C, or
> VB or Java or any ohter authoring language which has those? That's what
> *they do*. At some point, adding same syntax ends up creating same
> functionality.

> The fact is that the X-talks *are not like those other languages*. 
> That's
> what many of us actually like about Transcript.

Hi Chipp,

I think you're confusing the language (xTalk), with the development and 
runtime environment (call it HyperCard++ for the moment).  HyperCard++ 
is a Rapid Application Development environment that uses the concepts 
of stacks, cards and controls to make it relatively easy to build 
complex multi-window applications.  xTalk, the language that is used to 
control this RAD, is a HyperTalk clone, but could (theoretically) be 
replaced with any number of other languages, e.g. C, JavaScript, VB, 
PHP, etc.

I like the RAD, and I don't want to replace xTalk -- my original 
comment, that it would be nice if I could write "x = y + z" would mean 
adding a very small amount of "syntactic sugar" to xTalk, and would go 
a long way towards making xTalk look more a "real" language.

>
> RR has limited resources for modifying all of the many compiles of 
> engines
> it supports. My vote is they concentrate on adding features and fixing 
> bugs,
> rather than supporting multiple syntaxes.

I agree about wasting precious resources.  But I'd be willing to bet 
that "x = 1 + 2" is already supported in the parser, and is commented 
out for historical reasons.  It would be interesting if a RunRev person 
could confirm or deny this :-)

Best,
-- Frank