Ultra Beginner Question/Request

[Mark Wieder]

Len-

In addition to what Richard said I'll add my two cents:

I've found through experience that the holistic approach works best
for me; that is, I've been through a line-by-line conversion of
existing C and VB programs to xtalk and also through the approach of
"let's see what this program is supposed to do and recreate it from
scratch". The latter has been much more productive for me - quite
often I'll find that an algorithm that has been fine-tuned for
efficiency in another language runs faster and is easier and faster to
write if I just pretend I never saw the original code.

So how's this for an approach: convert the tcl/tk project to
pseudocode (a flowchart, just comments, anything that will describe
the original program adequately), then convert the pseudocode to
xtalk.

...all right, maybe three cents:

Xtalk, for me, has some of the same advantages and disadvantages of
forth. The bottom-up coding style is a real productivity enhancer:
once you get something working you can build other things with it. And
I have the same love-hate relationship with the lack of variable
typing that I have with forth.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net