>From : mark mitchell >Actually, the syntax is very easy and the grammar is obvious IF you are a native English speaker. (Except for that damn onTO >required for 'place', which gets me every time. I'm sure others can think of their own pet peeves :-) >Alas, it is (currently) an English dominated world. >Perhaps someone should start translating Xtalk into Arabic or something, just in case.
There is common mistake to think that computer language must be as near as possible to human pratical language. A computer language is more formal (mathematic) than natural (english). In french we have two words to distinguish this two practises: Natural language are "Langues" or tongue if you want and formal are "Langage" or language. They are very differents.(shortly) Formal is used to express logical assertion. Natural language is used to express evrything else (shopping, poetry,football narrator,...) , due to this king of pollution natural language is not adapt to express logical assertion, this is why one developped formal language. Physics law (mecanics law, electronic law) seems to fit this kind of language, so computer , wich are an electronic state of nature, are well discribe by formal language. But for human interface, one try to build "advanced" language (modular, human readable ...) to describe algorithm. C,Java,python, perl ... Are samples of powered formals languages (easy to read, short expression, reuse, portable ...) and they are not necessarly near to a particular natural language. The readablity of a code source depend more on write convention, documentation and words choose than on the grammar. I said that X-talk (aka hyper-talk) is poor (not powered computer language) because it is very constrained one. What about structure ? (Or Class in object point of view) What about references What about memory managing? What about Multi-threading ? What about paradigm (event-drive, procedural, GUI oriented. why stacks, groups, cards are fixed => Closed API... ? Is - there a well defined grammar rules (as we can find for most of language) ? In fact i preferred said that x-talk (hyper-talk) is a simple script/macro language for event call-back of a GUI RAD JML _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
