Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Doug Lerner]

On 2/10/04 9:28 AM, "Judy Perry" <jperryl at ecs.fullerton.edu> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Frank Leahy wrote:
>> 
>> Disagreeing right back at you.  If you want professionals to use Rev,
>> then you need standard assignment statement syntax -- without them
>> Revolution looks like a hobbyist language rather than a real working
>> language ("oh, it's just HyperTalk, and we all know that wasn't a
>> 'real' language/development environment")  And since it's perfectly
>> possible to support "x = 1" without affecting the current "put" and
>> "set" statements, I would argue that they should consider adding it.
> 
> If Transcript were to look just like C et al, what would be its
> comparative advantage??
> 
> Show of hands:  Who wants Rev to be as user-friendly as C?

To me, the advantage of Transcript over C is not syntax - it is:

    * The fact that UI building is native.
    * The fact that it is cross-platform.
    * The fact that there are so many high-level functions.

I would be perfectly happy (even happier, because it is less typing) saying:

    student.age = 21

rather than

    set the age of student to 21

and

    thisStudent.age + thatStudent.age

rather than

    (the age of this student) + (the age of that student)

doug