Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus? (wasAndy'scomments and positioning...)

[Doug Lerner]

On 2/9/04 9:07 AM, "Dar Scott" <dsc at swcp.com> wrote:

> 
> On Sunday, February 8, 2004, at 04:07 PM, Doug Lerner wrote:
> 
>> It would be nice to also support a JavaScript-like:
>> 
>> b.a = c
> 
> What could be a concrete example?
> 
> (field "Potatoes Required").textHeight = 20
> 
> Or like this?
> 
> field("Potatoes Required).textHeight = 20
> 
> Just wondering.
> 
> (this stack).textHeight =20
>

I think parentheses around the entire expression is more consistent with
other languages. For example, in JavaScript you would create a new date
object with

    new Date()

You might get just the 4-digit year with

    now = new Date();
    year = now.getFullYear();

or you might just do it in one step like:

    year = (new Date()).getFullYear();

Of course with Transcript, the = operator means the same thing that the ==
operator means in other languages. That probably can't be changed anymore or
everything wouldn't be backwards compatible. So some other kind of
assignment operator would be needed like

    b.a := c (looks like an arrow pointing to the left)

doug