Scott Raney wrote:
> Something that's always puzzled me about xTalk development is the lack
> of interest people seem to have in having their own handlers or
> externals support an English-like syntax like the built-in commands
> have.
> mycompare somevar with someothervar # 4 separate params
> mycompare somevar is someothervar # only 2 params
> SuperCard seems to allow this, while HyperCard, OMO, and
> MetaCard do not. Even so, I've never seen this listed as one of the
> advantages of SuperCard over HyperCard.
HyperCard DID that in version 1.0 (which hardly anybody will remember
;-) ... your first command would be converted into a message with 3
parameters, where the second would contain the string "with". I did use
that, but propably performance considerations made them change it.
> Does anyone ever make use of this feature? If not, why not? If so,
> are there any problem areas? One thing I can think of is that you'd
> have to be very careful about is using any built-in operators as
> "syntactic sugar". Should it try to evaluate them, or should it just
> pass the tokens literally in some situations? Take for example:
I am not shure, how you do that in SuperCard, but there are a lot of
cases where the source would get much more readable, especially if some
parameters are optional, and the parameters would not have to be in a
fixed order any more.
In AppleScript parameters can have "names" like "of", "with", etc.
SmallTalk has (had?) also "named" parameters, but there parsing was
easier, because these "names" have colons ("mycompare somevar with:
someother").
I'm looking forward to this feature, but it not really essentially
important for advanced programmers, is it?
Regards
R�diger
