Alternatives ?

[Skids]

Pascal. One of the very few languages ever that had two handler types.

I see. Also wasn't Pascal similar to Xtalk in being quite verbose; I seem to remember that moving from BBC Basic to Turbo Pascal and Delphi was not difficult whereas C looked like someone had spilled braces characters onto the page.

[richmond62]

Cripes: I suffered PASCAL V way back in 1984 at University, and was extremely glad when I was able to leave it behind.

My project crashed the University computer because it took more than the 2 MB RAM available.

And I can remember nothing about the language at all.

However: Yes: Moving from FORTRAN to BASIC was very easy indeed: then I had a 6 year gap with no computer programming at all, and then PASCAL: seem to remember the whole thing was not difficult at all: although the shocking concept of NOT having line numbers took a bit of getting used to.

[richmond62]

Mind you, I do not quite understand why xTalk having both functions and commands should be such a concern.

[Skids]

I don't think it's much of a concern although it could be argued that having the two makes the syntax more complicated than it needs be.

For example if both commands and functions were written as functions then the only change needed in a definition would be to include the return statement and also the code that uses the return value.

e.g.

put myFunctionName(paramA, ParamB) into tAnswer -- standard function

or

myFunctionName(paramA, ParamB) -- Alas this does not work

but the following does work although I can see no point in using it.

Code: Select all

on mouseUp pMouseButto
   put NonReturnFunction() into tReturn
   --NonReturnFunction()  # Does not work with or without brackets
   call NonReturnFunction()  # This works as does using put
   
   wait 5 seconds
   put empty into field "report"
end mouseUp

function NonReturnFunction
   put "This was populated by a function that has no return statement." into field "report"
end NonReturnFunction

[FourthWorld]

Mind you, I do not quite understand why xTalk having both functions and commands should be such a concern.

Intrinsically, it's a very minor additional contribution to cognitive load, so unlike anything else commonly used in the 21st century, and likely offset by other learnability benefits of the language.

But it can help us understand the declining popularity. Most other popular languages have enough common design features that learning another one is often easier than learning and xTalk.

[dandandandan]

In the same way that

5 + 8 * x

Is a lot more concise than

Get 8
Multiply 5 by it
Add 5 to it

Despite being “harder”…

HyperCard was very creative and HyperTalk was a fantastic stab at beginner level coding, coining the term scripting just for it. It was mercifully free of syntax, but there was a very low ceiling for complexity. Hard things were just too hard to do. It fit the path at the time towards simplifying things, and tossing around check boxes and buttons and things to click on with a mouse.

Programmers have sort of given up the quest for English clarity in programming languages. I think everyone wants code to be readable, in the sense that you can verbalize the syntactical aspect. Calling functions functions is normal, calling them as f(…) is an expected level of complexity.

I see live code script and it just feels bizarre to me shoehorning complex concepts into semi English. I see the additions they want to add that are JavaScript already. That tells me they can tell what direction to go. But the web took over this space completely years ago. There are ways to support xtalk but I assume they all require learning the modern way of scripting first.