Marty- Friday, December 2, 2005, 9:46:20 PM, you wrote:
> With regard to my previous post, students think that if they can say > hide field "xxx" > then they ought to be able to say > if field "xxx" is hidden ... > or > if field "xxx" is invisible ... > or > if field "xxx" is not visible... > but having to create a construct like > if the visible of field "xxx" is false ... > really baffles them. In this way I think Transcript could indeed be > more English-like. ...and that, of course, is the problem with Transcript being "English-like"... you tend to think that it *should* respond to English commands. In English hide field "xxx" and if field "xxx" is hidden are two completely separate language constructions. The first is an imperative statment commanding the computer to do something to the specified field. The second is a query of a property of a field. Is the field hidden? Is it not visible? In English this is not querying the state of existence of the field... we're not asking "is field xxx a pig", we're interested in a particular property of the field, in this case whether or not the field is visible to us. This is a different use of the word "is". What we're really asking in English is "is the state of the visibility of this field true or false?". This is very similar to the Transcript "put the visible of field xxx". Unfortunately, English doesn't really discriminate between the two meanings of the verb "to be" in the way that other languages do. Saying "I am happy" or "I am befuddled" is probably not a statement of self-identity as much as a description of a property of oneself. In much the same way "hide field xxx" is a shorthand way of saying "set the visible of field xxx to true". Maybe if you didn't teach your students about the hide command and stuck to the low-level functions they wouldn't get so confused. You'd lose some of the beauty and flexibility of the language, but it would be less easy to think of it as being English. -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
