This is an interesting point of view Marc, but I wonder if you are basing your point of view on your knowledge of C. Look at your example:
Yes, absolutely. I did not make that clear enough, sorry.
The basic for my "excurse" was, of course, that the "reader" (and the writer) of code is a developer, not a narrator. A developer will most likely be used to the standard term "++". That's the basic for me saying "it is clear".
And, if I understand what are saying, Transcript does in fact return an error if you use incorrect variable types:
put "xyz" into A add 7 to A
Will return an error as 'A' is not a number.
... I think this is because Transcript does not have "pointers" available the same way other (programming) languages do. Again: The problem is (in my eyes) the ambivalence of Transcript sitting between human language (but not using it really, as synonyms would have to work then) and programming languages (but not using them as "standard" would have to be working then).
I would offer that Transcript (and all xtalk for that matter) does not use redundancy to gain clearness, but instead uses redundancy to gain flexibility.
I see your point, but have to disagree: If it was for flexibility, Transcript would accept tokens to be LEFT OUT, which is not the case (as far as I understand the docs, that is: You have to use filling words in special cases like "put *the* location of something into myNose"). Flexibility would allow to say "put something's location into myNose" (allowing a "human language" short term like the genitive apostroph to be used).
I am not trying to argue against Transcript (just to make this clear once again), I just "stumbled" over "add 1 to pointer" being clearer than common programming code (pointer++). In my eyes, second to the somewhat irritating trial to be what a programming language should not be (inter-human communication), a difference in expectations WHO the reader (and writer) of code is may be the basic for this discussion: I expect a "professional developer" to be familiar with constructs like "counter++". This specific type of half-human-being would have to read more words and make a more complex interpretation (just like the runtime interpreter of Revolution) if he had to read "add 1 to counter", he would have to translate it into what the machine actually does (INCREMENTING a value - not "adding 1"). That's at least one step more, and developers, to my experience, are LAZY, if anything :-)
Marc Albrecht A.C.T. / Level-2 Glinder Str. 2 27432 Ebersdorf Deutschland Tel. (+49) (0)4765-830060 Fax. (+49) (0)4765-830064 _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
