On May 13, 6:14 pm, MRAB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On May 13, 6:32 pm, "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I once had to do a bit of scripting in AppleScript. The problem I > found was that AppleScript tries to be so much like natural English > that I never got a clear idea of whether something would be valid! You have a great point here. I recently read a blog posting that noted the same thing about Inform 7 (a specialized language used to write interactive fiction games) and its English-like syntax. I've read completed games in Inform 7, and they're very easy to understand, indeed. It does tend to read like English, though somewhat stilted/formal/artificial. Writing it, on the other hand (at least according to to said blog post), is a bit more difficult. Because the syntax is *so* English- like, one tends to want to write things that would be natural in English. However, because the compiler doesn't actually understand natural English, this frequently doesn't work. Python, OTOH, definitely *doesn't* have this sort of impedance mismatch for me. Python code looks like *code*, to be sure, but the language allows you to forget about most of the nitty-gritty details and just get stuff done. That's what I like about it -- *not* that it's "English-like," in any way. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
