Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Frank Leahy]

On Tuesday, February 10, 2004, at 12:31  AM, 
use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Frank Leahy wrote:
>>
>> Disagreeing right back at you.  If you want professionals to use Rev,
>> then you need standard assignment statement syntax -- without them
>> Revolution looks like a hobbyist language rather than a real working
>> language ("oh, it's just HyperTalk, and we all know that wasn't a
>> 'real' language/development environment")  And since it's perfectly
>> possible to support "x = 1" without affecting the current "put" and
>> "set" statements, I would argue that they should consider adding it.
>
> If Transcript were to look just like C et al, what would be its
> comparative advantage??
>
> Show of hands:  Who wants Rev to be as user-friendly as C?
>
> Judy

Judy,

You are about the 15th person who didn't read what I wrote (I'm picking 
on you because your message is so short and succinct, thanks).

I suggested ADDING an assignment operator syntax that is commonly used 
in essentially every other modern computer language, and that has its 
basis in mathematical notation.  I didn't say GET RID OF the current 
"put" syntax or GET RID OF any other xTalk construct -- I said ADD 
support for "x = 1" as AN ALTERNATIVE to "put" -- you get to decide 
which you use.  (And BTW, if you've ever written a parser you know that 
adding support for this is trivial, and it will have zero impact on 
runtime performance.)

Now, for those who have forgotten why I suggested this in the first 
place, it was in response to comments about how professional or 
un-professional RR appears to those taking a look at it for the first 
time.  Having "put" as the sole assignment syntax means, IMHO, that 
people looking at RR think it's more like HyperCard than less like 
HyperCard, when in fact it's a lot less like HyperCard.

There is one other good reason why this syntax should be supported, 
because it's a really big pain in the a-- to port algorithms written in 
other languages to RR.  I'm porting some code that parses the JPEG EXIF 
header, and I have to rewrite every frickin' statement from "x += y + 
2" to "put x + y + 2 into x".

But let's stop this discussion, ok?  No one from RR has piped up to 
suggest that they're even considering such a change, so the discussion 
is moot.

And my bet still stands -- I'm willing to bet $20 that the code to 
parse "x = 1" is already in place, but commented out in the RR engine 
for historical reasons.

-- Frank