Documentation on expressions??

[Graham Samuel]

At 20:14 09/06/2004 +0100, Geoff Caplan wrote:

 >Hi folks,
 >
 >Perhaps I'm just being dim, but I can't find anything in the
 >documentation about expressions & conditions. Keyword searching fails
 >to throw anything up, and there are no cross-references from the
 >control structure dict entries. Can anyone help me out here?

I see several people are already trying to help Geoff, but I wonder whether 
he is asking a question that's been in the back of my mind since I first 
saw HyperCard - is there a formal description of the language (in RR's 
case, Transcript) anywhere to be found, so that we would know **exactly** 
what an expression is, what a condition is, what a chunk is, etc. and could 
therefore have the foundation of the ability to write correct code first 
time through? I think the answer is 'no' but people who are more into 
discussing xTalk in a wider context may contradict me.

IMHO this lack of a formal description makes it easy to extend the 
language, but it reduces ease-of-use, or at least ease-of-introduction, for 
people who have been brought up in more academic environments. I've got 
used to it, but I must say I did make a huge number of simple syntactic 
mistakes and mistaken semantic assumptions for the first few months of 
xTalk use. This was in fact in SuperCard, which AFAIR is in pretty much the 
same state as RR when it comes to the lack of a formal language description.

Graham


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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France