Randall Lee Reetz wrote:
As I said, there are important aspects of the Revolution product that ARE unique... the use and GUI centered IDE, the multi-platform develop and publish flexibility, the viability of the user community and this online support group, the stability of the company and the rapidity and reliability of the pace of version development cycle, the constant evolution of the product in lockstep with platform evolution, etc. But the subject was the scripting language itself.
While of course Revolution is just one implementation in the xTalk family of languages, its specific dialect at this point is probably 30% or even 40% or more unique, or at least distinct from the Mother Tongue, HyperTalk.
If we exclude all externals (since they were written in other languages) and look only at what's natively in the engine, it might even be the case that Rev has added as many new tokens as were in the entire HyperTalk 2.x language.
All tokens related to arrays, sockets, URLs, new forms of repeat, icons in ask and answer, scrollbars, color, blendlevels, images, groups, gradients, aliases, system color and folder pickers, compression/decompression, binary file I/O, binary operators, Unicode, window modes, mouseMove and other messages, buffer control, video playback, QTVR control, drag-and-drop, executionContexts and other debugging/logging info, script-local vars, animated GIFs, image export formats, screen shots, new date and time formats, backdrops, timers, serial I/O, audio recording, substacks, template objects, labels as distinct from names, and dozens of new properties for even buttons and fields, just to name a few - all unique to Rev.
And then there's a good number of tokens not in HC that Rev has adopted from other xTalks, like SC's frontScripts, backScripts, graphic objects, transfer modes, and the merge function, and OMO's libraryStack message, just to name a few, along with a new altID property to make such ports even easier.
If it appears all Rev brings to the table is multi-platform support and its IDE, that perception will change as one spends more time with the Rev Dictionary. A LOT has been happening since the engine was born in '92.
I don't even use the Rev IDE nor its externals. With just the core language in the engine, I simply couldn't go back to HC or even SC if I had to. While we're all using xTalks, I've adopted a coding style that makes such extensive use of the expanded syntax and object model that I doubt much of what I do would run anywhere else.
Sure, Rev feels familiar to any xTalker. I guess that's a good sign of how passionate Mark Waddingham is about maintaining the flavor of the language (he was once nearly willing to engage in fisticuffs with me in his defense of the language style <g>; I acquiesced, of course, since he's both younger and stronger than me and more importantly fighting with a greater sense of purpose). But for all its familiarity, Rev is a brave new world among xTalks, one that has earned through the sweat of its many programmers a place of unique honor among the xTalk dialects.
True, Mark Lucas, SuperCard's lead programmer, is perhaps the greatest Mac programmer I've ever been privileged to know personally, and under his stewardship it's no surprise SuperCard has done as well as it has. But while Mr. Lucas may do the work of a ten men, not only does he have a stronger loathing of the Windows API than even myself, but he would also be among the first to note the challenges of doing this sort of work for multiple platforms. Drag and drop, for example, is a complex API on OS X; add in Windows and Linux and the complexity grows geometrically.
For all the inspiration Rev has drawn from its lineage, the Rev engine is quite an achievement in its own right. Browse through the Dictionary and you'll see what I mean.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
