Re: Toxic Soup and Enough for all
Re: Toxic Soup and Enough for all
- Subject: Re: Toxic Soup and Enough for all
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:22:40 -0400
On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Doug McNutt <email@hidden> wrote:
> bash and AppleScript have one thing in common that continues to frustrate me.
>
> They use the space character as a fundamental part of the programming syntax rather than saving it for use as a delimiter.
Well, it's more complex than that with the shell. It is a delimiter,
but you need to know when to delimit stuff.
In FORTRAN, space was completely insignificant, leading to the
infamous DO10I=1.500 error.
In most modern programming languages you can't put space in the middle
of a token (apart from quoted string literals, of course), but space
between tokens is completely ignored except where needed to
distinguish things that would otherwise look like one token.
> In AppleScript it's all over the place and unless you're a real linguist you make mistakes because you don't remember all of the possible single variables or
> commands that require an internal space.
Yeah, this used to drive me nuts. Learning the vocabulary helps a
lot, but when I encounter something new I'm never quite sure where the
command stops and the specifier starts... is it "open file", with a
pathname argument, or "open" with a file argument?
--
Mark J. Reed <email@hidden>
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