On Tuesday, February 10, 2004, at 12:31 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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?
Judy
Judy,
You are about the 15th person who didn't read what I wrote (I'm picking on you because your message is so short and succinct, thanks).
I suggested ADDING an assignment operator syntax that is commonly used in essentially every other modern computer language, and that has its basis in mathematical notation. I didn't say GET RID OF the current "put" syntax or GET RID OF any other xTalk construct -- I said ADD support for "x = 1" as AN ALTERNATIVE to "put" -- you get to decide which you use. (And BTW, if you've ever written a parser you know that adding support for this is trivial, and it will have zero impact on runtime performance.)
Now, for those who have forgotten why I suggested this in the first place, it was in response to comments about how professional or un-professional RR appears to those taking a look at it for the first time. Having "put" as the sole assignment syntax means, IMHO, that people looking at RR think it's more like HyperCard than less like HyperCard, when in fact it's a lot less like HyperCard.
There is one other good reason why this syntax should be supported, because it's a really big pain in the a-- to port algorithms written in other languages to RR. I'm porting some code that parses the JPEG EXIF header, and I have to rewrite every frickin' statement from "x += y + 2" to "put x + y + 2 into x".
But let's stop this discussion, ok? No one from RR has piped up to suggest that they're even considering such a change, so the discussion is moot.
And my bet still stands -- I'm willing to bet $20 that the code to parse "x = 1" is already in place, but commented out in the RR engine for historical reasons.
-- Frank
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