Judy Perry wrote:
1. It being "optional" didn't stop it from destroying accessibility to
verbose Lingo in Director. Latecomers to Director didn't have any other
learning "options" or "choices" than dot.speak.
Yes, I think that's a danger, especially if a large part of the audience
for books (and tutorials, etc.) is going to be converts from other
languages, who might find the dot notation more comfortable and easier
than "natural" language style.
2. Optional isn't the same as transparent. I'd be less leery if I could
look in a crystal ball and see that it was implemented in a transparent
fashion.
Well, we know that allowing a mix is going to be hard for RR. So why not
make it harder :-)
It wold be nice if there were a perf switch in the IDE: click
"dot-style" and your scripts appear in dot-notation style, click
"natural language" and your scripts are converted to traditional
Transcript style; so the same statement appears as either
set the stopColor of TrafficLight to red
or
set the TrafficLight.stopColour to red
(or even put red into TrafficLight.stopColour)
[btw - note how it corrects your spelling at the same time :-) ]
3. It's a slippery slope. Once it heads down that path, there will be
little reason to implement new functionalities in Rev taking care to do it
in a natural-language fashion.
Again that's a danger, which the community would have some role in averting.
But remember there are benefits to dot-notations style. There are the
intellectual advantages that make OO a good approach, but I'm the wrong
one to argue for them. What *I* like about dot-notation is how it allows
the IDE to make it easier to use for casual, or inexpert, users.
I like the fact that in my other-language IDE, I can do something like type
status = smtplib. and then wait for 2 seconds
The IDE looks up the list of all properties and functions available
within the smtp library, and displays a pop-up box showing them. I can
scroll through that to see what all ones are available, hit CR to select
the current on (or type the first few chars and it auto-scrolls there),
etc. If I select one, e.g. type 'rf<tab>' to select the rfc822
sub-library, I get
status = smtplib.rfc822
and again when I type a dot and pause for 2 seconds, I get a list of all
the possible completions.
Then if I type Add<tab> it selects the first matching function, so my
display now shows
status = smtplib.rfc822.AddressList
and if I type the open paren, I see parameters needed by that function,
and the documentation describing them.
I don't know for sure that it would be *impossible* to do that in a
Transcript IDE - but it seems like it would be much much harder than it
is in a dot-notation language. And it makes using an unfamiliar library
so much easier than hoping between a script editor and one (or more)
documentation windows.
--
Alex Tweedly http://www.tweedly.net
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