Most of my feelings have been expressed by others, but there is one point that I think is perhaps under-appreciated.
The notion that we should add to the Transcript syntax to make the program less "beginnerish" (which I agree it isn't anyway except compared to the absolutely incomprehensible C and Perl languages, which I few as write-only) just because we *can* misses a key point.
A new person coming into the environment and looking for how to do something looks at scripts and docs. Unless you not only implement new and more complex syntax *in addition to* the regular syntax rather than instead of it, but also do not document it and discourage its use in scripts a newbie is likely to stumble over while learning, you still run the risk of alienating new programmers who look at the (let's face it) ugly C-like syntax and immediately head for REALBasic. The only other alternative, really, is to resort to levels or layers of access in a (generally futile but well-intended) effort to hide this stuff from people for whom it might be dangerous.
Nope. I'm with those who say to RunRev, "The syntax is beautiful. We don't care if 'real programmers' (whoever *they* are) think it's amateurish. We'll be happy to keep making a living by writing apps faster and cheaper than all those professionals do because we have a language that thinks like we do, not like the compiler does."
Dan out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dan Shafer, Revolutionary Author of "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought" http://www.revolutionpros.com for more info Available at Runtime Revolution Store (http://www.runrev.com/RevPress)
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