| John, you're right. This is not HARDER.
It's simply more efficient while still being visually terribly easy to grasp.
And it's 5 characters, not 4.
set x to 1
x = 1
x is 1
When you've typed several hundred thousand lines of code, those five characters are an annoying impediment to progress when you can just use an = sign to assign a value to a variable instead of a set and a to.
See, people feel good with different levels of verbosity in code. I'm super comfy with the syntax of Lingo and for the longest time, I used "set myValue = myOtherValue". When Lingo offered both syntaxes, I moved over to the more efficient one over time. But it still supported both, so any user could use either without a problem.
It's pretty painfully easy to understand. Context is not lost.
Also, I have no idea what you do not understand about the word, "optional".
Visually, it's not that hard to realize that "x = 5" means the same thing as it did in math class. And in a logic statement, "if x = 5 then do something", is just as easy.
Of course, if you don't understand what the word, "optional" means, well, I can't help you there.
And of course, of course, there is no way in hell that this is going be to realized by the Apple AppleScript team as a flash of brilliance that they missed (OS X was prototyped in Director and Director uses Lingo) and wipe out the syntax that you can't live without. These guys use Objective-C and C and if you want syntaxes you will not enjoy, try picking up Objective-C. You'll love the semicolons on the end of every line along with the brackets, colons and ampersats.
On May 6, 2013, at 12:45 AM, John C. Welch wrote: On 5/2/13 8:58 PM, "Christopher Stone" < email@hidden> wrote:
I've always thought
set _str to "some string"
Was grotesquely verbose and much harder to read than:
_str = "some string"
because…four extra characters…
nope, don't get it. Don't care to.
also, how is "set this to that" HARDER to read than "this = that". for one, the latter is more ambiguous.
But again, please, the entire obsession with minor bits of extra typing in programming is something I've never understood, nor do I care to have it explained to me. I understand the history of it, but we no longer need to worry about filling 4K of RAM.
I find it depressing that in many ways, programming is still stuck in the mid 1980s.
-- "I've long said that we'll know computers have arrived when there's no need for people like me. The fact so many everyday people have to turn to interpreters, consultants, experts, classes, training, and technophiles to use their computers and put them to work, to me, represents a fundamental failure of the industry."
--Geoff Duncan, 8/28/06
|