On Jun 23, 2005, at 10:09 PM, Dan Shafer wrote:
Verbosity is a virtue in my mind. Not only does it make code more readable and therefore maintainable, but I can't tell you how many times I've just sort of guessed at what command or property change might have some desired effect only to have it behave exactly as predicted. Only with xTalk and Python have I had that kind of experience. And I love it!
I don't think the two properties you're talking about, clarity and intuit-ability, have anything to do with verbosity. All three are effects related to the english-like nature of Transcript. Anyone who understands English and the concept of variables understands what "put 3 into x" means.
I think the verbosity claim is generally a red herring. Not that you're making that claim, Dan, you just helped me up onto the soap box ;-) The go-to (no pun intended) comparison is "put 3 into x" vs. "x:=3" That comparison is dramatic but misleading. "repeat 20" is no more verbose than the equivalent in most other languages. "if" is still "if" There are even counter-examples, such as various languages that surround conditional groups with braces or other syntactic sugar. Further, the built-in command set, including things like chunk expressions and url-based filesystem access, lead to there being less overall code in Transcript compared to other options. I have yet to see a systematic comparison of the length of Transcript vs. that of other languages.
The clarity of Transcript comes simply from good naming conventions for commands and functions. The intuit-ability is much the same. If good naming happens to lead to slightly longer names, that's not a problem for me.
regards, Geoff _______________________________________________ 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
