Re: re. footnotes [was Re: Variable Ponderance]
Re: re. footnotes [was Re: Variable Ponderance]
- Subject: Re: re. footnotes [was Re: Variable Ponderance]
- From: Jon Pugh <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 20:35:09 -0700
At 2:48 PM -0700 10/1/04, John W. Baxter wrote:
>On 10/1/2004 12:23, "has" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Its syntax, procedural semantics and
>> expression/statement distinction are much closer to those of
>> Algol-derived languages; dynamic types and garbage collection could
>> have just as easily and more directly arrived via Smalltalk; and it
>> certainly doesn'tborrow the more unique [even now] and interesting
>> features of Lisp. Thus comparing AS to Lisp seems to me to overrate
>> and overemphasise an unimportant, ill-defined and quite likely
>> indirect connection, and miss out on the much more important and very
>> direct link to Smalltalk.
>
>Fortunately, Jon Pugh probably remembers where the "immediate" influence
>came from. He was there early. On the other hand, what may be necessary is
>to know the "immediate" influence in the earlier HyperTalk design came from.
It was, like always, a combination of influences. William and Warren came from LISP backgrounds. They were working in CFront, an early C++ variant created with the preprocessor. The design specification required them to implement a HyperTalk-like syntax. Stir, rinse and repeat.
They apparently made quite a mess using their own custom macros extensively, but I think Chris said all of that cruft is long gone. The dialects were created with some custom YACC variant to support spaces in tokens, but once again, that's been reduced if not completely removed.
Jon
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