Just please don't remove the ones we've got. I haven't typed out
"background" or "card" in 30 years. My brain would short out.
On 6/26/17 1:48 PM, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:
I'm against synonyms being part of the core language - they have no place there
as they are 'tailorings'. Indeed a good part of the argument for them could be
solved by better tooling - e.g. autocomplete and suggested tokens if one isn't
quite right.
Every single property in the engine could have synonyms and some many (see the
recent discussion about clipsToRect). An attempt to 'normalise' hilite and its
various compound forms would have resulted in 40 (iirc) additions to the token
table.
Moreover every single synonym reduces the set of possibilities of things we
could add in the future and can cause backwards compatibility issues in
existing scripts (as they become for all intents and purposes reserved).
There is no easy way to administer synonym additions centrally and each one
increases the maintenance burden in the current architecture.
So the only 'synonyms' which it makes sense to adopt right now are the ones
which help move the current syntax to having a consistent and sensible
canonical form which is easy to document and explain.
This allows, in the future, for a far more general and decentralised way to
tailor syntax *in general* whilst ensuring there will always be one canonical
form to which scripts can be translated to enable them to be compiled and (more
importantly) be translated to people's preferred form.
So, I get the reasoning behind them (although I still think it better to train
people implicitly to use canonical forms via better tooling, as if everyone
'sings' with the same language, uniform understanding is increased) so in the
future everyone will be able to 'knock themselves out'...
However, I'd point out that the primary reason for the architecture to allow
that is specifying custom syntax, and non-English language variants. The fact
that the 'synonym problem' would also be 'fixed' by it Is but a happy
by-product.
Warmest Regards,
Mark.
Sent from my iPhone
On 26 Jun 2017, at 18:59, Mark Wieder via use-livecode
<use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote:
On 06/26/2017 03:55 AM, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:
I think it is probably generally true that the more consistent and simpler the
language is, the easier it is to learn.
...and I would follow that with the (long-running by now) argument that synonyms provide for an
ease-of-use facility in coding and therefore a simpler approach to using the language. For the
trivial case here, if I can't remember whether the language supports "is" or
"=" for variable assignments, I can use one or the other without having to interrupt my
train of thought to look it up in the dictionary/guides.
One of LiveCode's strengths is the fact that there are many possible solutions
to a given problem, and the xtalk language allows much flexibility in solving
it. For a problem placed before any three coders, you will find at least four
different solutions. Limiting the language limits the ways in which a problem
may be thought of - that's the basis of the linguistic relativism, and it
applies to programming languages as well as to natural languages.
--
Mark Wieder
ahsoftw...@gmail.com
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--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
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